Delayed Gratification

My connecting flight from Cincinnati to Milwaukee was one of those tiny planes that you feel instantly too close for comfort with the 20 other people on board.  We sat on the plane at the gate for an hour and a half after our departure time due to the door being too frozen to shut properly.  So, I got to spend an hour and half listening to 20 imbeciles hoot and guffaw at the jokes they continuously made up about the "situation."  Next to me sat an old woman with her hair perfectly tied into a perfect bun with her perfect shoes and her perfect manners.  She kept asking me what was going on and I perfectly explained our status about 6 times.  Then I said, TURN UP YOUR HEARING AID.  No I didn't.  An enormous Latino gentleman with his wife who was enormous but a lot smaller than him, took turns trying to fit into the seats and yelling at their 3-year-old chunker of a daughter who shrieked for minutes at a time.  One girl with a thick drawl thought it would be a good idea to tell everyone her life story, even though nobody asked.  Her husband, in Oklahoma, wouldn't ever buy anything not made in the USA.  She informed everyone that she hates her step mom, and "who doesn't?" (me). She loudly stated that she manages a McDonald's and wouldn't put up with any one of her employees who spit in the french fry grease anymore.  Comforting.  An old man next to her waxed poetic about how airlines used to serve free champagne.  I didn't even want to think about what this girl would spout off if she had any of the juice in her.

We deboarded after they told us the plane wasn't fit to fly, so we headed over to a different gate, and the McDonald's manager of the year did cartwheels down the vacant hallway, flopping backpack on her back, screaming "Merry Christmas, everybody!!!"

Amen

I came upon St. Patrick's Cathedral with great surprise, Madison Avenue was closer to the train stop than I had thought.  It reminded me of a cleaned-up Sagrada Familia.  I walked in because I hadn't been to church in over 6 years and also because I wanted to breathe in the warm smell of incense enclosed within thick pillars and stone statues.  Squeezing in between a gentleman who was emailing from is Blackberry and surreptitiously checking the Jets score, and a couple who wouldn't stop groping one another's thighs, I looked around at the rest of the crowd.  They looked uncomfortable, not too calm, squished betwixt their enormous fur coats and their bulging shopping bags full of consumerism.  Around the hundreds of people seated, there were people literally milling around the pews as 12:00 mass was in session.  Big boots, hats, and cameras flashing, as the words of Isaiah, Luke and the Thesselonians were being spoken.  The scene reminded me of Notre Dame, where I was appalled at the amount of loud, crazy tourists who hung out at one of the most sacred buildings in the world, screaming in mid-day drunkenness and scaring the pigeons. At St. Patrick's, a woman who looked and sounded like Toni Braxton did the readings, her strong voice shouting into a microphone.  The priest, clad in red, had a thick New York accent and had the tone and imposing inflection of Bob Uecker - instead of saying how many outs there were, he's telling people how important it is to go to confession, his voice reverberating, echoing off the long lines of the towering walls.  As the service carried on, I remembered when I was really young and my mom would bring a bag of stuff for me to do at St. James: coloring books, puzzles, snacks... I was really getting the word of God while eating Cheerios from a Ziploc and finding where Waldo was and yelping loudly as my sister repeatedly pinched my arm.  These are the real religious experiences that stick with you forever.  It's interesting how last weekend at this time,  I was at the Museum of Natural History, staring at exhibits of how monkeys turned into men, and this week, there I was sitting on a hard, wooden pew at St. Patrick's Cathedral, crossing myself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit listening to a guy tell me about how God created all things and all men.  After exchanging "peace be with you's" and germs directly before receiving the body of Christ, I walked out, thinking that this holy visit would be sufficient for the next six years.  

Kindle

Kindle: Amazon's Wireless Reading Device

"This is the future of book reading.  It will be everywhere." Michael Lewis

USED AND NEW: Available from $349.00

Availability: Expected to ship in 11 to 13 weeks.  Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.  Gift-wrap available.

----

When the people at work started talking about the Kindle as though it were the holy grail, I took some time to figure out what I thought about this new phenomenon.  Then I began to see it all over the city.  People sipping coffees in parks, scrolling down their saucy romance novels.  Men in business suits, scrolling down their Wall Street Journals.  Children poking at words to have their definitions pop out at them immediately.  I don't know if it's the insane accessibility that throws me or if it's the fact that everyone seems to be picking this up and thinking nothing of it.  I guess this must be how music lovers felt at the onset of the iPod.  Yeah, you'll have any book that you want in front of your eyes for only $9.99 each with a simple click, but you have to pay $349 first.  It will only take 30 seconds after that simple click, but you have to wait 11 to 13 weeks for your Kindle to arrive at your doorstep first.  How about going to a half-price bookstore two blocks away?  Or have we become so lazy that we can't even take a leisurely walk to give patronage to the Barnes and Noble or the ... library?  Yes, the dictionary feature is nice, but what happened to flipping through that old volume that is getting dusty on our shelves?  Most importantly, in a time where most of us spend a good portion of our days scrolling, clicking, dragging and dropping, our eyes slaves to the screen, don't we need a break? Don't we need real bound paper in our hands, in our laps?  Doesn't it feel nice to get our eyes off that glossy abyss for an hour or two a day, to pick up something that weighs however many pages are in it, to lick our fingertips and turn the pages in anticipation of whathappensnext?  Don't we love to look at our stacks of books that have creases in the bindings and dog ears squished in between the leafs and scribblings and ideas scrawled by our own hand in the margins?  

It's green, yes.  Oprah endorsed it, true.  But until they invent a Kindle complete with the sweet smell of the paper within a book, I'm sticking to my old fashioned ways.

Slush

Will I ever be slush?  That sagging, loaded pile of words that have made their way into the offices of agents?  These words have been scribbled down by millions of wannabes, of hopetobes, of dreamedsincetheywere7tobes.  These piles are formed from far and wide.  From the cornfields of Iowa to the riverside towns of Saskatchewan, from the bellies of great cites to the Walden Pond cabins of Maine.  Stories, histories, oh-so-important memoirs are gouged from minds and placed onto paper.  People put their absolute hearts and their unremitting souls into these stapled and bound  masterpieces.  Their days are filled with anguish, writing these words.  Their wakeful nights are filled with tosses and turns about one sentence, one comma, one climax.  From the desks of these starved writers fly their lifetime achievements.  They fly Fed-Ex, or travel by UPS, or maybe even the snaily Postal Service.  From one hand to the next these pages are tossed... until they eventually land on another desk.  A more important desk.  And on that fine, oak desk, they sit for days, weeks, months until their corners curl up, aching to be noticed, to be read.  Lowly interns are instructed to pick them up, to peruse.  The lowly intern finds himself in a loathsome mood that day, hasn't had his coffee or his I love you or his espn.com yet and so he reads through the story quickly and pays no mind.  He isn't taken by the first few lines, he doesn't let the words carry him to the 10th, the 40th, the 190th page.  

NO.

He scrawls on the top of the cover letter.  

And those two letters, those two letters stand alone on the top of the pile of slush, and the fantastic dream of a house by the sea and a family of three and a rope swing on a big oak tree, dies.

Smells Like Home

I got on the plane in New York with exhaust in my nose, cigarette smoke and rust.  People and infrastructure smells.  I stepped into Milwaukee and it smelled of delicious cold.  Clean and dry.  Mequon smelled even better... like coffee and snow.  And silence.  A nighttime silence.  It's that perfume Mequon wears in the winter, which I haven't smelled in while.  Fireplaces.  Empty parking lots (SteinsHomesteadPavillion).  Down comforters.  Labradors.  Vacant fairways.  The slow-paced wafts that you can breathe deeply and smile.  The smell overcomes you like something you've seen a thousand times, something old disguised as something new.

The Beginning of Forgetting

The Kettle of Fish pub hosts a monthly reading that I've been invited to since I've joined the Writer's House family.  It's something I'm always too tired for but end up walking out of feeling fuzzy and contented, like a child who has just been read to before bed.  The new, up and coming authors usually prattle on about life and their hands move about in front of them with a sweaty underconfidence that can sometimes be distracting, but for the most part I'm genuinely entertained on these Wednesday evenings.  

Tonight, the first gentleman was 20.  (20!) He reminded me of the kid in Finding Forrester, minus the whole creepy Sean Connery mentor thing.  He had obviously been through a lot and told his sad tale so everyone in the audience could sigh and then shake their heads slowly, closed-mouth-smiling in turn. 

The second woman had a theatrical look to her, the longish, kinky hair and the almost too obviously homemade scarf hanging across her shoulders and down past her nervous knees.  She read from a memoir about her mother with Alsheimers who had just recently passed away.  Her anecdotes were subtle and hilarious, complete with a lot of the necessary repetition that goes hand in hand with living with someone with the disease.  As all diseases do, this one puzzles me to no end.  How can certain things in one's mind just simply vanish, like their own daughter's name, or the street where they have been living for the past 40 years?  Then I remembered, (not like I'd forgotten), that I have been feeling the initial pangs of the horrible disease as of late.  I don't actually think I have it, but I've been frightening myself and others lately with this strange lack of recognition for things I have said or done in the very recent past.  I can recite the first and last names of everyone in my cabin at camp when I was 7 years old, but I can't figure out where I put my glasses when I wake up in the morning.  One morning I even walked out the door and started down the sidewalk without them on, only to realize it after a few seconds of blurred squinting.  Lyrics to songs stick with me forever after only a couple of listens, but I can't remember entire chunks of a conversation I soberly had yesterday.  There's a term for people choosing what they remember, but, of course, that term has somehow slipped my mind.  Everyone forgets things, I know, but my case is beginning to scare me.  I get nervous fast-forwarding a few decades when I'm actually at the age when this is supposed to happen, that I'll walk around without a speck of my former life inside my brain.  That thought, in a twisted way, might not be all that bad...which reminds me of a quote from an Alexander Pope poem that a pretty good movie placed into it's title:

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;

Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!

Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me, 

Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each prayer accepted, each wish resigned.

The third woman was short and stalky and had written an entire novel about her cat, Homer, so naturally I politely turned my listening ears off and let my gaze drift outside towards the redgreen Christmas lights on the busy street.

Elsa and Me

Today, her siblings were off at doctors' appointments, dance lessons, and soccer practices with mom, so Elsa and I got to have some quality one-on-one time.  It was the most extraordinary day.  First we chased each other around the kitchen table for a while.  Then we sucked spaghetti noodles through our lips and made kissing noises.  We played fetch on the stairs and I held her by her feet upside down for a few minutes.  Then she looked up at me with her big brown eyes and said "poo poo."  She doesn't say many things I can comprehend, but she does know that phrase, and it's always appreciated.  Then we had some very important business to do out at the park with a slide and a sandbox so I helped her put her shoes on and she helped me put on mine.  We sang (or I sang and she shrieked) the ABC's the whole way down the sidewalk.  When we got back home, we threw things at each other for a few minutes and then turned the lights on an off, laughing at the difference, for what seemed like an hour.  Finally, we took turns putting stacks of paper cups on our heads and cracked up every time they fell off.  To be honest, when her mom came home and I had to speak to a real person with real words and sentences, I was a little sad to be out of Elsa World.

74

I'm an extremely verbal person.  When asked a question about one topic or another, I give about a novella's worth of my opinion whether the questioner likes it or not.  It's not how I want to be - if I had my wish I would follow the Swedish proverb to "talk less and speak more," but alas, Fate or DNA or a subconscious need to be heard has dealt me this trait.  That said, when in the presence of another person, I thrive on conversation.  For me, it is akin to breathing.

For as much as I like to talk, I have never caught myself doing it to myself.  Since moving out to New York, I have noticed that a good number of people out here talk to themselves.  Maybe its a city thing.  The buildings and the traffic and the people get jumbled inside of them and they begin verbalizing thoughts that a person who lives in, say, Nebraska, wouldn't even fathom - no less say out loud.  

In the Russian laundromat near my apartment I sat reading and watching my underwear spin, when an overweight Hispanic woman sat down by the door with a cup of hot coffee in her hands.  She began sputtering of what sounded like a list of colors or types of vegetables or bad 80's songs.  I don't know what exactly her lists were doing out there in the air for all of us to know, but I do think it calmed her to do it, so that made it okay with me.  The only time she stopped was to watch me put my hair up.  After she finished her laundry and walked out, I felt sad, or empty somehow, in need of more lists.

A few days ago, on the way into the city, there was an old African American man seated a few seats across the way from me.  He had been babbling on without a partner and these days I've come to just assume that people have a Bluetooth on the ear I can't see, so I let it be.  Then I remembered that I was on the subway and cell phones don't work down there (thank god).  This man was speaking to himself.  He had a bunch of black plastic bags around him so I figured he was homeless and went back to reading my book.  When he stood up and began a dialogue about the number 74, I knew I wasn't going to get any reading done on this trip.  So I sat back and enjoyed the show.  This man was a performer.  He should have really pursued a career in play acting, because his timing, his body language, his facial expressions were phenomenal.  The best part of it was the fact that he seemed to be having a heated argument with someone who wasn't there.  So this was no ordinary list making monologue.  It was exactly as I had thought it was before: like a phone conversation you witness where you can't hear the person on the other line.  He seemed to be getting pretty upset with whoever it was in his head that he was talking to, so he sat down to calm himself and catch his breath.  He picked up a smallish black bag from his pile and I got nervous that inside of it was a bottle of Fleischmann's or something that might harm me, but he gingerly pulled the bag halfway open to reveal a smiling plastic doll.  The doll was a comical looking man in a black robe with his arms outstretched and his smile almost as wide as his arms.  The man began talking to the doll, and I became more comfortable with the situation because now he had something to talk at besides the passing blackness outside the moving train.  Suddenly, he turned in his seat to face me and the woman sitting next to me and made the doll face us.  He asked, "Have either of you ever seen this before?"  We shook our heads no and he looked at us and the doll in disbelief.  Then he proceeded to walk around the entire car asking everyone if they had seen the doll before.  Nobody gave him the answer that he sought, but he continued to ask the question loudly, now to the car as a whole.  I wanted to see what would happen if I would say yes, but my stop came up and I had to get off the train.  Filled with disappointment that I would probably never see this man again, I also laughed aloud to myself as I walked up the stairs to the street.  People passing me probably thought to themselves, "Oh, another crazy one coming from the underground."  But I didn't care.  The city must be creeping inside of me.

Sand

A favorite paragraph from a favorite novel:

--I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.  When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem.  "Which problem?"  "The problem of how relatively insignificant we are."  He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?"  I said, "I'd probably die of dehydration."  He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that single gain of sand.  What would that mean?"  I said, "I dunno, what?"  He said, "Think about it."  I thought about it.  "I guess I would have moved a grain of sand."  "Which would mean?" "Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?"  "Which would mean you changed the Sahara."  "So?"  "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert.  And it has existed for millions of years.  And you changed it!"  "That's true!" I said, sitting up.  "I changed the Sahara!"  "Which means?" he said.  "What?  Tell me."  "Well, I'm not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer.  I'm just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter."  "Yeah?"  "If you hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..."  "Uh-huh?"  "But you did do it,  so...?"  I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"  "That's right."  "I changed the universe!"  "You did."  "I'm God!"  "You're an atheist."  "I don't exist!"  I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.--

-From Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

The F Train Diaries

A weeks-worth of observations of what/who I find myself among on the F train as I take it betwixt Brooklyn and Manhattan.

---

Re-selling items of human necessity is a very popular past time on the train, apparently.  

~An old, withered man who looks like he belongs in the 1800's is selling batteries for a dollar. They're probably expired.  I pass.

~A younger man is selling condoms for 25 cents.  Again, probably expired.  I let him walk by.

~Two teenage boys are selling candy - probably from the mid-nineties but I haven't had Swedish Fish in years and the boys are adorable.  Why not?

--- 

People need more sleep.  I'm sitting across from three people who seem to be in deep REM.  The gentleman on the right of the triple-seated row is probably a student at NYU, with his earbuds and his Aeropostale hoodie.  He lazily clutches his North Face backpack and I watch it as it slips slowly down his lap.  Every few minutes he pulls it up, half opening one bloodshot eye, then lays his head back against the wall.

The woman on the left is surely dressed for a corporate job.  Her black skirt and suit jacket are finely pressed, and her dark red pumps shine in the train's fluorescent morning light.  She holds an over sized black leather bag in her lap, which her nodding head bobs precariously over.  The paint on her eyelids glows as I watch her eyeballs drowse back and forth slowly underneath them.  Her head is literally almost in her $1000 bag when she sudden she suddenly wakes, stands, smooths her skirt, and walks out the 2nd Ave. stop.  

On the middle seat perches a tiny Japanese woman who dozes politely and soundly.  She holds a Japanese newspaper in one hand and a coffee in the other.  I watch the coffee, tottering on her knee, as she sleeps with her hand over its top.  Her hair is a perfect proportion of salt and pepper, and her feet barely touch the floor.  I wonder if she's dreaming about home.

---

From an invisible compartment between the cars, an announcer comes on the speakers at each stop.  "This is a Manhattan bound F, next stop Delancey please stand clear of the closing doors."  This morning, I'm convinced, that announcer was Morgan Freeman.

---

I steal glances at all the books in my vicinity before starting in on my own.  I'm reading Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven."  He stole my heart with "Into the Wild" and is hurting it with this chronicle of the roots and effects of Fundamental Mormonism in America.  I read it on the subway in the morning, and out of the city at night.  I always get excited when I see someone who has a book I've read.  I look at the person, if this does happen, and size them up to see of they would be comparable to a friend.  A lot of the time it's Harry Potter or some other mass-market fiction so usually I just smile at the 8 year old reading the Prisoner of Azkaban and go back to my own book.  Lately, I haven't been able to help feeling embarrassed while reading "Under the Banner of Heaven."  Not only are disturbing sex scenes portrayed, but they're being put on by the most unlikely of characters.  Father and daughter.  Grandfather and his sister.  Cousin and cousin.  You know.  Normal Mormon stuff.  If it makes you want to want to vomit, it's there.  But when these scenes occur I have a tendency to close my book a little bit, bring it closer to me so that the lad next to me reading Potter won't glance at a sentence and take me for some zealot and move across the aisle.  

---

I wish that everyone's iPod earbuds could be removed and turned into speakers.  About 80% of the train today has happy listeners.  I just want to hear what it sounds like if all of the music from each of the headphones could be heard in unison.  

D-Bags?

Today on my lunch break I called the voter registration offices in Wisconsin to see what the deal is with absentee ballots these days. I sat on a bench in Madison Square Park next to a burly fellow with a white goatee. I scrambled for a pen when the man on the phone told me the website I needed to access, and the friendly gent gave me a pen from his pocket. After I had gotten off the phone and returned the pen, the man told me a few things, un-prompted, but interesting nonetheless. He said, "You know, I would prefer Obama over McCain if I had to choose but I used to be a paramedic, and I always say I would never let either of those douche-bags into my ambulance." I chuckled and nodded, "Alright, understandable." He said, "I'm voting for none of the above, or I should say none of the below if you don't mind my rhetoric." Sometimes, I get really excited for November 4th to be over.

Trader Joe's at Last

With their puffy fall vests zipped over their orange and brown sweaters, their chucks tied loosely and their colorful canvas bags hanging from their thin frames, Brooklynites enjoy an October afternoon in the brand new Trader Joe's.  Controlled chaos.  Slow, happy, politely comfortable.  Accidentally bumping into each other's Achilles tendons with red carts, waiting for the throng to subside in front of the cheese section, sipping the creamy tomato soup samples and gazing through aisle after aisle of organic color.  One cannot be in a hurry here, they would pull out their hair in frustration with the crunchy, earth-toned 20- and 30-somethings meandering through decisions between either peanut butter or caramel filled pretzels.  Even with 18 registers, the line takes an average of 45 minutes, but that only gives us time to drink small cups of coffee and smell each other's lavender-scented hair.  People spill out as others spill in, and Joe's pockets grow deeper and deeper, money falling into them like leaves from trees.

Run On

With my pony tail up and my pumas on, I'm off down the stairs through the gate and past the man digging through the trash on Butler then right onto Smith with its cafe fronts and men in suede shoes smoking Camels and over the subway vents, left onto Warren with its chain link fence surrounding the chipped-green floored basketball court and the shouting kids in big jackets and saggy pants, right onto Henry with its dark brown sidewalks and dark brown brownstones and comfortable women in their comfortable sweaters walking their small dogs and smiling up at the branches, across Atlantic stinking of sea and spit and diesel and up the hill for a left onto Remsen, dodging walkers and strollers and runners so many runners and finally down down down to the dead end where the sidewalk curves into the Promenade and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh the city is there with its brightness and the sea hugging it and the twinkled bridges and the cut out square lights against the dark blue sky, past the benches with the blonde haired lovers and the brown haired lovers and the black haired lovers, holding hands and smiling at the city with their sweetnothings in their ears and on their lips, with the city the river the statue on my left and I turn around to go home, my heart and my shoes pounding.

The Draughon Cronicles

I rarely learn as much in a span of 24 hours as I did when spending them with the dynamic Sisters Draughon.  As an evening with Maggie and Whitney unfolded, I found myself repeatedly baffled and amazed at the ideas that came from their charged minds.  And at my own kitchen table, no less!  I can't imagine if I'd had the complete trifecta, which would include the youngest, and I think we can all agree most enlightened, Kate. I will provide a list, which is abridged, that explains just a fraction of the phenomenon that is the collective brainpower of the Sisters Draughon.

. At the end of my days, will I be proud of what I have accomplished for the greater good, or will I be more proud of a family that I have created?  With this in mind, are there two types of people in this world?  Those who feel satisfied with their life in terms of their job or those who are content with what they have procreated?

. "Glee," when said in place of "yay" or "huzzah" is the new form of expressing excitement.

. Art as something not only at the Metropolitan, but also in the pallet that is everyday backdrops.  Color.  Texture.  A walk in Central Park can be a stroll through an art museum in itself.  

. Bean dip and Red Hot blue corn chips make an excellent gourmet snack.  So does Jamba.

. To jump in with both feet always and with every aspect of life.

 

Winning New York

The night after Robbi and I skidded into New York on our U-Haul's three good wheels, we decided the occasion called for celebration.  That Saturday afternoon, with our armpits in rare form and our entire bodies out of breath, we lay on my new living room floor laughing at life.  Two girls who hadn't driven regularly in nearly 5 years, had no experience driving any sort of oversized vehicle, had no radio signal (except one shining beam of light in a Journey song) and no CD player, hadn't ever changed a flat tire, hadn't ever driven into 8 million people's city that never sleeps, MADE IT.  A few beers were in order.

We met a couple friends of ours from Wisconsin at a nearby tavern, still sweaty and delirious.  Without realizing what was happening, we came upon a classy rooftop party in the middle of Manhattan.  What a view!  The majority of the guests were dressed in slick blacks and strappy shoes.  Robbi and I had our moving clothes on.  [Note to self: Always look good in New York.  You live in New York now, Lisa.  Step it up.]  Apparently the posh partiers weren't too swank to play a good old fashioned game of flip cup... This is a game of precision and accuracy, of concentration and reflex.  After our momentous trek across the country, we had no problem winning the gold, and kicking off this ride in New York in style.

Craigslist

Unfortunately, I don't have a positive anecdote when it comes to my apartment search in New York City.  Eventually, I will find a legit place and be comfortable as a clam but at the moment, I have some bad news about Craigslist.  I have been out of the loop for the past year and a half (this is my excuse), and didn't realize how careful one really does have to be when dealing with Craigslist.  I won't bore with details, but the story goes : Don't believe what you read.  Don't send money anywhere without seeing a place first.  And don't trust anyone by the name of Randy Harper who claims he is from England but has a Florida State drivers license and long, greasy gray hair.  If you do any of these things, you are the victim of a scam.  And the feeling of foolishness that ensues is less than awesome.  

Communal Entertainment

I like to think about what people did in the past few centuries to entertain themselves while gathered in groups.  Sliding stones around a backgammon board as far back as 3000 BC.  Bundling up on a cold winter night to stand outside together and stargaze, possibly even discussing how small we all are in the grand scheme.  Gathering around a grand piano while one person pounds on it and everyone sips whiskey, links arms, and sings.  Huddling close to the phonograph listening to "Au Clair de la Lune" on record and marvelling at the invention of music coming from a spinning plastic disc.  Sprawling on the carpet next to the big wooden box radio listening to spoken dramas and comedies until it was time for bed.  Tuning into the Ed Sullivan Show, watching in wonder as John, Paul, George, and Ringo began their journey through stardom.  

Staying with friends in Madison, Wisconsin for the past few days sparked this idea.  I realized what groups of people do now, and while its no backgammon or Sullivan, it is pretty entertaining.  Now, we see groups of people - families, friends, neighbors - gathered around a laptop, bent over, listening to and watching captively, our generation's form of communal entertainment: YouTube.  "Have you seen this one?"  "George Washington?"  "Supermodel?" "Grape Stomp?"  (Careful on that last one, I actually laughed my way into herniatic surgery as a result of it... no joke).  And we huddle around until our necks can crane no further and our stomachs cannot bear the pain, and we all sigh, wipe away the laughing tears, walking away feeling elated with thoughts of all of the unfortunate souls we just filled an hour laughing at.  The question is, what's next?

P.S. A not so much comical as inspiring YouTube video to lighten spirits:  "Where the Hell is Matt?"

'dem ol rigs

As I am buckling my seatbelt and turning off and stowing my electronic devices and keeping my tray table in its upright position, I'm listening to Joe Mississippi behind me.  He shouts across the aisle with Sally Immigrant for the first two hours of our flight from Sao Paulo to Houston.  He's been working on an American oil rig off the shores of Rio, she's been visiting her relatives with her 8 year old (obnoxiously talkative) son.  He says "oil" like this: "ol." She says her heart is in the United States.  He says "yeah, I miss Wal-Mart."  He's good at sleeping on planes and tells her she can smack him if he "starts in on the snorin'".  She says she thinks airplanes should fly faster and she wants to watch the Olympics on the screen in the seat in front of her.  "Do you think they get those up here?"  He's worked everywhere - 14 years of "noble" work in the Gulf of Mexico, Nova Scotia, Alaska.  She brings up Hurricane Katrina, asks if his family was affected.  She says how sad it is what happened.  He says he thinks the people there should learn to help themselves and stop asking for "handouts."  He calls them (the survivors of Katrina, this is,) greedy.  

It was a good thing the two of them stopped talking when they did, because I came very close to turning around and ripping this man's oily fingernails out one by one.  After a few moments of peace, the woman's son began narrating the entire flight.  "We're leaving!"  "Oh, the drinks are coming."  "I like Pepsi, not Coke."  "My feet are cold."  "Oh, the moon!"  "Oh, a window!"  "Oh!  We are going fast now."  "Oh!  That was bumpy."  "Don't fall asleep mom!"  "Oh, there are video games on this thing!"  ...  Once he found the video games, the ride was silent.  For as much as I dislike the mind-numbing contraptions, I thanked Buddha for inventing them on that flight.

Quenched

My thirst is quenched for the time being. I've swallowed 3.5 months of England, with sips of western Europe along the way. I've guzzled 11 months of Thailand and taste-tested a few of the glamourously impoverished countries in Southeast Asia. And now, after finishing off a glassfull of 3.5 months in Brazil, with a few shots of southern South America, I'm full. And I have to go to the ladies.

(no title)

[inspired by "Upwards over the Mountain," Iron & Wine.]

Remember when I´d sprawl out on the grass next to you while you planted our garden in the corner of the yard?

Remember filling the bird feeders and hanging the laundry on ropes between the three oak trees?

Remember when you found Marshmallow, saved him, and brought him home to us?

Remember when you´d steal potato chips off my plate at dinner?

Remember reading the Bernstein Bears to us as we drifted off to sleep?

Remember the candy dinners you made, inviting all the neighbors and nearby cousins on the last day of school?

Remember when we´d take baths together and you told me I´d get those one day too?

Remember laughing together in the back seat on roadtrips across the country?

Remember how good you were at watermelon seed spitting contests?

Remember when we saw puddles and splashed through them, when we turned on sprinklers and danced in them, raked leaf piles and jumped into them, built snowforts and huddled in them?

Remember when you let me lick the brownie bowl?

Remember when you taught me how to knit, how to ski, how to make baby footprints with my hand on the steamy car windows?

Remember how you cried when I told you I knew about Santa?

Remember our walks around the block at night, when you´d listen, or I´d listen, or we´d just hold hands, quiet?

Remember how safe you made me feel? How loved I knew I was? How little I knew I´d miss you?

America

I’ve recently become fully aware that the grass is always greener on the other side of the Equator, the Prime Meridian, the International Dateline, and that no matter where I am, this will be so. But only as I was running this afternoon, and stepped through the third pile of dog feces this week, I understood why. It’s America I crave. It’s the metaphorical crisp, straight lines that I dream about. Yesterday I completed my last day of work here in Brazil. My last day with people who take extra long lunch breaks, who stare at the wall pretending to do something, who take advantage of the hard-working foreigners who have decided to grace them with their presence. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. America is on the brain.

In fact, America has been on the brain from the start of this three-month adventure. I realized about half-way through that no matter what I do during the day, no matter what I am focusing my attention on, (washing lettuce, chopping carrots, mopping floors), everything that is American fills my thoughts.

Every 15 days, a new Newsweek comes to the magazine stand near our apartment. It’s the only non-Portuguese magazine sold. I pay 11 Real – more than 3 times the amount it costs at home, just to fill an afternoon with what is happening there. Peter is constantly checking the internet for the Brewer’s scores, for sports blog updates, for what Favre plans on doing this week. He walked 15 blocks to the nearest T.G.I. Friday´s at 11:00pm just to watch one of the NBA Final Four games. We read “Into the Wild,” “Armies of the Night,” and “Dharma Bums” just to hear American voices and imagine American landscapes. In June, we listened to Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” on an iTunes audiobook. We hung on his every word. Some nights, after work, we rent American films and television series’. Hearing Sawyer’s southern drawl on Lost even makes me nostalgic. We get excited about Subway. We get excited about mail. I thrive on correspondence. On talking to my dad on Skype. On g-chatting with people in Madison. On English.

It may have taken 15 months of living far, far away, and one too many inconsiderate stray dogs, but I know now. It´s time to say “sawat dee ka” and “tchau” to the world. It’s time to come home.

Smack That

A small, dented radio sits on the counter in the kitchen where I work. I would enjoy the radio if it would be tuned to a Brazilian Lounge station or some Portuguese Live Jazz shindig, but alas: loud, static-interrupted American Pop music is what we hear – repeated over and over and over. I have found this sort of thing in many of the countries I have been – an absolute adoration for our top twenty “hits.” I’ve never been a huge fan of Britney Spears or James Blunt, but somehow, after three months in Brazil, I am able to sing along to their “Do You Want a Piece of Me?”s and “Same Mistake”s (respectively) with perfect intonation and timing. Most of the cooks and chefs walk around singing in time with the music but completely butchering the actual lyrics. It’s like they’re singing with an enormous amount of anesthetic in their tongues.
Some of my favorite moments in Graciliano’s dirty little kitchen have been when I am asked to translate lines from some of these ballads from English into Portuguese. The other day, a short, cute, innocent older woman who is in charge of meats asked me what “smack that” means, referring to the song by Akon featuring Eminem. Not knowing the Portuguese translation, I simply smacked her bottom. The entire kitchen (who had been wondering the same thing as she had I’m sure) roared with laughter. A while back, Zak, the middle-aged balding purchaser for Graciliano’s (who is known to walk around constantly whistling or singing either Tracy Chapman or Bob Marley in very poor English) asked me what Chapman’s lyric “baby can I hold you tonight?” means. I didn’t want to demonstrate on Zak, figuring it would be awkward and inappropriate, so I simply put it in my finest Portuguese: “Bed, you, me, tonight.” Since then, I have rarely looked Zak in the eye.
One of the waitresses is heartbroken that her boyfriend moved to Portugal to live with his parents. He sends her American pop songs over email and she becomes immediately obsessed with them. Last week she printed out the lyrics to Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around” and asked if I could take them home and translate them so she could understand what her loverboy was trying to say to her from across the Atlantic. I did, but found it quite difficult to figure out a way to explain to her that “oooooh”s and “uhhhh huhhh”s aren’t really words.
While Peter was gutting tomatoes with one of the cooks, he noticed that she was hum-mumbling a song that he recognized. He started laughing, she asked why, and he told her the song was called “Short Dick Man.” His demonstration of it needs no further explaination.
The rickety radio in the kitchen has rekindled my fire for Snoop Dogg though, which is a plus.

Bliss in Ouro Preto

Thickmetal church bells clanging. Redbougainvilla hanging. Curlyhaired babies tottering. Wrinklecheeked women smiling. RustyVolkswagens climbing. Cobbledavenues descending, rising, descending. Warmcool breezes combing. Tallcraggy mountains watching. Smokingstoneworkers selling. Chattingcraftswomen selling. BraziliansFrenchItalians inspecting, buying. Lazydogs lying. Redbluegreen windowsills bowing. Chocolatemilkshakes slurping. Sweetpopcorn popping. And I, sunglasswearing, reading, enjoying.

$2.50 per day

The bus is one of my most and least favorite parts of our tiny little world here in Belo. It gives me a chance to breathe, read, and prepare for a day – as well as unwind, sit quietly, and look forward to a solemn evening of literature, spaghetti, and film. But it also makes me anxious, annoyed, and amazed at the filth of the bus-riding public. I turned to page 237 of Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” and I was entranced. Even the crashing bumps couldn’t take my eyes from the rhythm of the left to right. Until a sneeze came upon the man sitting beside me. Rather than raising a hand to cover the exiting liquid, the nice man turned his face toward me and my midnight children, spraying the slime onto my forearm and page 237. I sat in the back seat one afternoon, squashed between two squishy women who must have forgotten to shower for the past fortnight. One of them, nearest the open window, was chewing on individually wrapped candies. The fruity smell coming from her pack would have made the situation a bit more pleasant had she not been throwing each wrapper out into the wind, out onto the already-litter-ridden passing streets. [At this point, I asked myself why there are so many Environmental Ministries in the world, why there are thousands of books and articles and documentaries out there warning about what is happening to our poor planet, why I spend so much time scrubbing out peanut butter jars, reusing shampoo bottles, warding off Styrofoam if there are people like this woman all over the world.] She seems to be enjoying her candy, though, which is wonderful. And, today, I sat three rows from a man who seemed to be texting a friend. Suddenly a noise came from his phone – extremely loud music. I figured it was just his obnoxious ringtone, but apparently he must have left his headphones at home, because he had decided to grace this Monday afternoon’s passangers with the high-pitched thumping sounds - not unlike that of two individuals having intercourse - of a Brazilian banda he fancies. No matter how many surprised looks I shot at Peter, or how many sharp glares I directed straight at the DJ, the “music” carried us all the way to our stop.

Conversations with Gizelle

This is a to-be-continued series of short, broken Portuguese conversations (translated into what they would sound like in English) I have had with my co-worker, Gizelle. Gizelle speaks absolutely no English; she has yet to even master “thank you.” Thus, we speak in her native tongue – or what we both know that I know of it. Gizelle and I work with vegetables, fruits, and greens. She has a photo album of the day she gave birth to her now 18-month-old daughter, Christiana, which she showed me not long ago. Quite graphic. To me, she looks like a stout, light-brown pear. She is exactly my age.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” Gizelle says accusingly.
“I am,” I smile. She looks me up and down, slowly raising her eyebrows.

“What you do at night?” I ask Gizelle.
“Play games of video.”
“Oh! Video games!” I consider telling her my true thoughts on video games, but I don’t know the words in her language for waste of time or rot your brain. “What does your daughter do while you play?”
“I give her other controller, and turn the power off. She think she play.”

“How are you go to Argentina?” Gizelle wonders.
“Bus, then airplane.”
“Did you go on a bus to Brazil from your house in America?” I take a moment to catch myself. I wonder how long that would take. Three weeks?
“No, I fly in airplane.”

“What you do on your day off tomorrow?” Gizelle asks.
“Sleep, read, walk in park, call to my sister.”
“You talk to your family a lot. Dad Monday, sister Saturday. You are close. When talk to mom?” I consider lying. Telling her that I talk to her just as often, or that she’s always busy. But I sift through the words I know in Portuguese and realize I can probably get the truth across.
“When I had 11 years, mom : cancer.”
Gizelle looks confused.
“Mom of me,” I point to myself, “Is not here.”
Gizelle looks perplexed.
“Mom of me,” I point to my belly, “cancer.”
Gizelle starts to nod.
“Mom of me,” I point upwards, “does not have life. She is there.”
“Ah, yes. Sad,” she considers me for a moment. “The mom of my husband, does not have life also.”

“You like broccoli?” Gizelle asks, seeing me pop a stem into my mouth.
“Yes. Much.”
“I no like broccoli.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a vegetable. I no eat vegetables.”

“How long on bus from house Lisa to Graciliano in morning?” Gizelle inquires.
“15 minutes,” I answer. “How long on bus from house Gizelle?”
“One hour and half.”

Graciliano

Every morning, after emerging from the breathy, sleepy-eyed bus, Peter slides the carved wooden bench forward on Graciliano’s front deck so we can enter our day. The enormous black and white clock on the front wall dings 8:27. “Bom dia,” we say, nodding to all of the blackly dressed waiters and waitresses taking the chairs down. “Bom dia,” we say, smiling at the cleaners, splashing the marble floors soaked in soapy water. Our shoes wet, we carefully stomp up the silver-painted metal stairs – past the Mens and past the Ladies, into our kitchen. Our home away from home away from home. The glaring, fluorescent lights overhead shine along down the white tiled walls and the less-white tiles of the floor. My locker, third from the bottom and on the far right, opens with a small square key for which there is no need – it only holds my stinky white shirt and carrot-orange, strawberry-red, zucchini-green splotched apron. Cloth shower cap enclosing my pony-tail and Pumas enclosing my soon-to-be aching feet, I take a deep breath and dive in. The tower of ovens warms the entire upstairs, beginning our day with fresh bread aromas and fresh salmon jolts. Boiled sweet coffee, served with a ladle, is passed from hand to hand. I grill. I chop. I boil. I orchestrate my work onto giant white serving dishes. I garnish. The whole while, Portuguese is being yelled, laughed, and gritted through gossipy teeth. A society all its own, here in this kitchen – and to be a part of it, I have to listen carefully, learn quickly, and smile.

TravellingPhotos

There is a strip of light-colored wood that runs vertically along the wall separating our hallway and our kitchen in the apartment here in Belo Horizonte. I instinctively pulled out about 5 from the envelope of many I had taken to Thailand and repacked for this trip to Brazil.
The top left picture (because when I look at these pictures it's almost always like reading a book) is from a party the Chamberlain side of my family had in January of 2003 for my grandmother's 80th birthday. The party (and most other shindigs on this side) was held at my aunt Wendy's home in Mequon. The picture is of my dad and I sitting on her beige carpeted stairs. My hair is shoulder length and I'm wearing a red v-neck top. Dad is in his college professor look-alike attire: a wool sweater, collared shirt and dark tie. He's got a grimace on his face, like he just whispered some wise-ass secret into my ear, and my eyes are squinting closed, my teeth showing, my mouth wide open, cheeks pink, my body obviously convulsing with laughter - the kind I always share with him.
Next to this is a polaroid taken on the camera Peter gave me for Christmas in 2006 - a gift I treasured dearly, especially in large groups. My friend Carrie had a group of friends in college who would take polaroids of one another holding the photo of the previous subject in some creative position. In this photo, I had taken a picture of my sister, Colleen, holding a polaroid of my cousin, Gordy, at our annual Christmas Eve brunch. Gordy, in what we can make of his photo, is probably holding a picture of another, younger cousin, his expression goofy and inquisitive. "What sort of project is Lisa trying to accomplish here?" his smirk says. Colleen, with Gordy in her hand, has her eyebrows raised over her right shoulder, a half smile across her lips and a leafless tree stands in the window at her back. It's one of the most beautiful pictures I have of her.
Next, a black and white photo. It's creamwhite-rimmed corners are curling inwards, framing a young version of my mother's face. The tiny date on the edge of the photo reads "OCT" which gives reason for her turtle neck sweater. She must have not liked the photo because there is a small "x" written in pencil on the back, and I remember picking this one out of a series which I assumed were a set of Senior pictures her mother must have taken of her in their Richland Court home. The window to the left of her, out of the frame, casts a faint light on her soft, long hair and her clear complexion. She smiles, her near-perfect teeth shining, her small, straight nose wincing slightly at the attention she's being given, her large, mascara'd eyes focus on the floor. If this one got an "x," I wish I could have seen the chosen yearbook photo.
Next to mom sits another photo, this one set in Madison, during the summer of 2006. It was Peter's 23rd birthday, I remember, and we all wore neckties in his honor. My brother, Paul, who had moved away from Madison only a year or two prior to the photo, was visiting for a friend's bachelor party. The photo is of the two of us, (Paul and I) on the sidewalk with a very large woman in a white jumpsuit who had happened upon us while walking past and wanted in on the moment. She proudly holds up a peace sign while Paul and I both are bent over in laughter, mouths agape, our eyes wet and our foreheads sweaty.
Below these is a picture of 5 people outside of the Outback Steakhouse in Fox Point, on a bench facing the sun at sunset. I took this picture after my farewell dinner in late April, 2007, a few nights before I left for the Far East. I'm happy to have this photo - all of it's subjects bright blue eyes gazing at me as I insist on repeatedly clicking the button. From left to right, my dad's wife, Pat, her hair loosely up, a black blazer across her shoulders, and her hands folded upon her dark jeans; then Colleen, in a flowered top, her hands in an identical position as Pat's (I now realize that they all have their hands placed the same way); dad in the middle with a denim collared shirt unbuttoned with a light green shirt underneath, his glasses on, his bangs whisping across his widows peak in the early summer wind; Joanne (Paul's bride-to-be) sits to his left in a lilac blouse, her calm smile wide, her purse on her lap; and finally Paul, leaning forward in his white buttondown and a 5 o'clock shadow, giving one of the most genuine smiles I've ever seen in a picture of him. The cars in the parking lot behind my family are scattered, reflecting the orange sun in their windows, not privy to the fact that they would have a part in my stack of travelling photos.

It´s All Happening

take off, land
take off, land
tin-covered food
ear popping
up-right sleeping
suitcase dragging
slow, excruciating cab rides
fast, life-threatening cab rides
bus rides
wrong ways
labyrinth maps
hostels
hard pillows
hard water
sore feet
sleep. sleep. sleep.
Stella Artois, Beer Singha, Antarctica, Quilmes
bottles and bottles and bottles of water
strong coffee
dizzy digestion
ferrys, boats, tuk tuks
parks
"Oh, you`re American? Oh, you must be George Bush."
dripping with sweat and icy cold
world weary, fascinated
homesick, tantric
"What`s the time change?"
"What`s the exchange?"
Pound. Euro. Dollar. Baht. Dong. Real. Peso.
"No, I don´t want that t-shirt."
dreams of far faces
dirty clothes
dirty nails
beautiful sunsets
beautiful photos to send home:
cliffs, blue water, unaware natives
breathing deep
gravesites/monuments/histories unknown
Pöt passa Thai dai. Pode fala Portugues. Puedo hablar Español.
Where`s my passport?
Where`s my wallet?
Where`s my home?

Passing Afternoon (Iron & Wine)

This is my favorite song at the moment:

There are times that walk from you
Like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn
But the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms

There are things that drift away
Like our endless numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe
In the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls it's children from their piles of fallen leaves

There are sailing ships that pass
All our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children until she lets them go at last
And she's chosen where to be
Though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds

There are things we can't recall
Blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers
Rolling around the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned

There are names across the sea
Only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the window closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes
And they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone

An Umbrella Painting

How close is "too close for comfort"? I don´t believe there is a limit here on Ipanema in the sand along the raging Atlantic in Rio. This beach is even more crowded than the thousands of apartment complexes that line it. Colorful umbrellas pounded into the sand would paint the entirety of the scene from a bird´s eye view. Only pockets of sand would show. Miles and miles of beach - miles and miles of striped chairs and thonged bottoms. The smell of burning skin and cigarettes is juxtaposed by the fresh watermelon being sold from a tray on top of a man´s brow and by the warm salty sea air that wafts across the sand every once in a while. Posing in the sun and shouting at the few clouds when they conceal it, these people have no problem being almost naked, inches away from strangers. A young woman sprawls in her chair facing away from the sea, towards the sun, while an enormous octogenarian arranges his speedo a foot and a half away from her on his water-facing foldup. When I stand to go for a dip, my skin dripping with sweat, I realize that I may not be able to even find a way through the people to the water. I tiptoe between empty coconuts with straws hanging out of them, sunscreen, beer cozies, legs, breasts and back hair, to finally find the waves. They are powerful waves here, and each wave is full of more people.

Two Countries, Both Alike in Dignity

Dear Thailand,
She´s with me now. She may not have her own place yet but the place she is in has a maid who makes her scrumptious breakfasts every morning before work. She may work 48 hours a week with only a 15 minute break, alongside only Portuguese speakers, covered in gourmet food and espresso, but she´s learning a ton about food. My people are richer. My people have a variety of different faces. My people live high-style. Our national futbol team is the best in the world. Nay, in the universe. I have more land mass. I´m hilly - even if she does have to walk up and down my hills huffing and puffing the whole way to work. My horizons are gorgeous. My currency is strong. My government works as hard as its people. I´ve got Pele, and Gizelle. My streets are clean, without dog shit. My lines are straight, my streets are paved, and my buildings are solid. The dogs here are domesticated, and well fed. I´ve got Carrefour too. And big shopping malls - and not only in my capital city. I know, neither of us have involved ourselves in wars, but socialism works better than a fluctuating constitutional monarchy. You may have the best beaches in the world, but I´ve got beaches too!! So she´s not staying with me as long as she did with you, I´ve the Amazon.
Yours, Brazil
----
Dear Brazil,
Say all you want, she loves me more.
Yours, Thailand

Futbol ao Rio

This afternoon, Peter and I took a walk along Rio's Lago Rodrigo de Freitas. On the way back to our flat, we got the feeling that something was happening here in Rio de Janeiro. Something big. Along the square crack-tiled sidewalks, we began to hear it. First, someone was dribbling the ball, (low, calm hum), then the ball was crossed, (dull roar), then someone shot the ball, (stark, white silence), and finally, the ball hit the back net, (screams, shouts, explosions, fog horns, bombs, har horns, blood-curdling and toe curling NOISE). Fireworks went off in the distance. I felt like I was actually at the game. I had to stop and look around me to see if I was in fact there. But the sidewalks were empty. I looked upwards through the labyrinth of the canopy to the apartment buildings above. Yes, the windows were open - voices blurting out of them. I glance back at Christ the Redeemer, and even he had a look of glee in his eyes. We turn a corner to see an open faced pub - overflowing with people. Inside, all facing the enormous flat-screens, a mob of raised hands, raised glasses, flashing flesh, grown men crying fat tears of joy. Women, men, children, dogs, everyone and everything in this city can feel that a goal has been scored. Even the enormous waves crash up against the beach a little harder for that minute or two of aftermath. Some sort of melody comes from the loud hubub - it takes me a few seconds to decipher it... and there it is : "Olè, olè olè olè....."

Journal Excerpts

This is a compilation of excerpts torn out of the journal I kept in Thailand.

10 May (Airplane from Chicago to Bangkok). Canada has a lot of really huge lakes. They gave us snacks made from soybeans, cashews, dried shrimp and peas. It was space food essentially - packed tight. There were so many shrimp that I didn't want to eat individually, so I shoved the entire bag in my mouth. The scene dad and I had at O'Hare was precious - he had to park the truck in the lot to avoid a ticket, and time was dwindling as I waited for him to return to say goodbye. I have a photograph in my mind of him coming towards me, seeing me, jumping into a run, and embracing me, saying how much he thought he'd just missed me. I cried slow tears down both my cheeks and didn't let go of him for a while. I told him to make sure he eats right.

13 May I was going to cut my hair, to Peter's dismay, but then Ray and Liesel at the office told me I was beautiful with long hair. I guess we'll never see me with really short hair until I'm a mom.

17 June Sunday mornings / afternoons at the orange coffee shop... The owner's name is Pookie so we call it "Pookie's." We come here all the time to eat American breakfasts and read and listen to the Beatles. I love the decorations, the miniature Christmas tree in the back corner, and the pictures on the side of the fridge - sort of showing off their lives in a cute, artistic way: Ferris wheels and beaches, hammocks and hats. Pookie and her sister pooled their money together to open this place - and it has a character so unique no wonder they are laughing in all of the pictures. They bought colorful dishes and coffee mugs of all shapes and sizes, painted the walls orange and wrote a menu in English.



2 July In a letter to my friend Caitlin, I wrote : "All of a sudden, with complete naturalness, I discovered home." This may have taken two months but it finally happened.

5 July Bird is my worst student. He is 6, very small for his age, with shortly cropped hair and long, drooping earlobes. He's so cute that I have a really hard time getting mad at him. He sneaks up to the whiteboard and copies the lesson into his notebook from there, drawing on it as he pleases. When I tell him to please sit down, he hops to his desk on one foot. Later, I'll find him in the back of the room on the floor, with his long socks dangling from his feet, tied together in a complicated knot. He normally stands on his chair while I'm teaching, waving his arms upwards and downwards to live up to his English nickname.




9 August Thailand is such an in-between country. I wonder what it feels like to be a citizen of a country so far behind in some ways that it struggles to mix in the Western cultural items and language uses, creating a jumbled, skitzophrenic being. For example, when answering their expensive, flashy cellphones, these people say "hallo" to their caller. This is actually examples one and two, because the extremities that people here buy in the category of electronics is unreal. Cellphones seem to replace soap, food, and fitting new clothing on some people's shopping lists. Next, we have the Mickey Mouse craze, along with Hello Kitty and many other cartoon characters, who are splattered over most T-shirts shorts, flip-flops, purses, and of course, cellphone satchels. Why? Do they know these things are childish? Or are they just thinking that there are English words on their belongings so they must be cool? Which brings me to another point : the use of English on T-shirts and store signs and whatnot. Things like, "I bring all the boys to the yard," or "Luckiest Kid" or "Bitch." I wonder whether half these people know what their clothing says or means. A lot of the time, the words are completely misspelled. They love the song "Zombie" by the Cranberries, 15 years after the fact, and they love KFC. I still don't know how I feel about it, though. Would I want to live in a culture so confused in some of the most basic pop-cultural goings-on, or in one that is completely traditional and lets in none of Western influence?


11 August (An excerpt from Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity.)
"This woman's English was seamless. Every one's was. I had sixty words of Spanish and my friend had maybe twice that in French, and that was it. How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated and then found hugely comforting."

20 September (An excerpt from Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.)
"Whilst man is in one location, he thinks of another. Dancing with one woman, he can't help but long to see the quiet curve of another's nude shoulder; to never be satisfied, to never have the mind and body cheerfully stranded in a single location - this is the curse of the human race!"

18 October I waited at the breakfast table on our last morning here at the Old Phuket Hotel, drinking coffee and reading Lolita. I wanted to wait for the right moment to interrupt the foursome that has intrigued me throughout the trip. Alex, Betty, Rod, and Barb are ex patriots from the UK, who live in Canada and Pennsylvania, respectively. They're each about 75 years old, and for some reason, I have just needed to listen to them and chat with them. They seem so content with just sitting and chatting with one another, Barb and Betty a bit more, Alex and Rod sitting back and staring into space, complacent. They talk about the daintiest of things, like the taste of pineapple jam, or whether or not they'll go for a swim today. Things seem much simpler, slower paced - maybe that's what draws me towards them. The thought that they have lived through so much more than I have, the fact that I miss grandma, the prospect of a good conversation, that's what kept me waiting at breakfast. They ended up giving me a great recommendation for where to stay in Singapore, which I do want to talk Peter into going to with me. So cute, so thoughtful.

25 October On the Tuk-Tuk ride into Vientiane, I was nervous that Laos was going to be ultra-dirty, worse than Thailand. I said, "When we got to Thailand, America looked like a shining diamond. Now, we're in Laos and Thailand looks that way." But after a stroll around the finer parts of the city, Laos doesn't look to bad at all. We ate dinner at a place called "Le Petite Sushi" owned by a Japanese gentleman who speaks English, French, Thai, Lao, and Japanese. He waxed poetic about the Internet and gave us a helpful guidebook free of charge. We also had our first taste of BeerLao, which is excessively advertised here. Afterwards, we found a nice Scandinavian bakery next to a huge fountain, and discussed how much a Kip really is. (10,000 Kip = $1)

24 November Today is Loy Kratong, a Thai holiday that always falls on the full moon of November. In that way, it's sort of like Thanksgiving - and it feels good to have something to celebrate at this time of year, while everyone at home is celebrating, eating, shopping, getting together. Thanksgiving was two days ago - it was a little rough, just thinking about everyone getting together without me - yes! Life does go on whether I'm there or not!

5 December Happy Birthday King Rama!!! Peter and I are in our yellow king Polo's, drinking coffee and playing scrabble at Pookie's - the day is ours, as Thailand pays it's many respects and gives its all in celebrating this "Auspicious Occasion of His Majesty the King's 80th Birthday Anniversary Celebration!" I feel like the days leading up to this day were much more intense than the day itself - kind of like Christmas. Come to think of it, it may actually be the closest thing they get to Christmas, as the king is practically Jesus to them. Yesterday, we had a ceremony at school for him in lieu of the opening flag raising we usually stand through every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I felt really connected with the king, the school, the kids, I guess, standing with the teachers in front of all of the students, facing the massive portrait of the king. They sang many songs in his honor. I haven't gotten the chills in those situations for a couple of months now, but yesterday I definitely did. I can say now that having all of these yellow shirts and songs and wais is really starting to make sense. He's becoming dearer to me as the months pass.

4 January I have begun babysitting/teaching English to Sha-Sha, a 2 year old who lives with her family here in Chachoengsao. Yesterday, we talked about the Christmas tree, Rudolph, and the princesses from Disney movies. Today we played well - like old friends almost. We hung out with barbies first and then we headed over to her "pool" full of balls and stuffed animals (not water) in the middle of the living room. We fed the penguin and the hippo fake fruit and shared it with each other too. I let my imagination crawl out of it's dusty box in the back of my heart and felt completely comfortable. She was laughing - her mom was laughing - I kept thinking how amazing it is how quickly a child can fall in love. She asked her mom in Thai if I could stay longer. We ate apple slices to her mom's delight - she never eats them.

14 February Valentine's Day in Thailand = Giant Sticker Fest. Rather than giving one another box-fulls of Valentines like at my elementary school, Donges Bay, these primary school kids are parading around with scads of stickers attached to their faces and bodies. It's ridiculous. Even the most serious of teachers hand out and have stickers all over the place. Really silly, but what isn't here?

1 March (An excerpt from Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork)
"There is something about the life of a foreigner in Thailand that draws those who find themselves unwilling or unable to think about their 401(k)s; and in the leisure, freedom, and isolation that the Far East provides, these types swing inexorably toward the pendulum edges of their souls."

Peachy

Peter and I have become quite fond of getting massages for very cheap prices during this past year. I'm sure we've had upwards of a baker's dozen: Thai massages, oil massages, foot massages, sandy beach massages, and the latest- Vietnamese massages. They're always hit-or-miss, and I've become a great judge of what the next 60 minutes will be like upon the initial touch of these small Southeast Asian women's hands.

Tonight, after a long day exploring Hanoi on foot, and after a delicious meal had settled in our tummies, Peter and I headed for the nearest spa. The costs usually range between 3 and 9 US Dollars. This one was the equivalent of $6, and worth every Dong.

The tiny woman from Van Xuan Massage Parlour may have pushed and pulled and twisted every sinew of my neck,
she may have pounded, smashed, individually punched each of my vertibrae,
she may have mercilessly dug her tiny thumbs into each gap in my ribcage,
she may have chatted quietly to her friend and turned on Whitney Houston,
she may have spanked, stretched, and snakebited every inch of my skin,
she may have beaten and bruised me to the core,
but she left me writhing in the good kind of pain, her hands smelled like peaches, and I will never forget her.

Angkor Wat

St. Patrick's day will be spent on a bus to Phnom Penh, and then celebrating in a city I never knew existed pre-5 months ago. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The ride from Koh Chang to Siem Reap took upwards of 14 hours, beginning at the crack of dawn and ending with us passing out with the moon high above our heads. I got a turn on the dinky red plastic chair in the front of the aisle stuffed with backpacks and extended legs. The others fell asleep, their heads bobbing and jerking with the bumps on the road. I put on my ipod, not feeling at all sleepy, and set my eyes on the road ahead. Cambodia is much dustier than Thailand - a thin layer of covers every leaf, every roof, every shoulder. As we pulled out of the bustling mess of a border town, the horizon became farther away than the dusty sky. Few trees grew in this barren stretch, and those which did looked lonesome. Of the vehicles lumbering down the dusty red gravel roads, some motorcyces, one or two cars, most were large brown tarp-covered trucks carrying secrets - boxes of coconuts, guns, people? I had never been on a bus with open air windows, fleck-filled breezes, a cigarette hanging out the tired driver's lips... I was ecstatic with what was to come. Every ten or fifteen jolts, there was a big swerve. The road would detour slightly to the right in a half circle before returning to it's straight, endless path. It was on these small detours that I would clentch my teeth and my toes and my fists, fearing the bus would actually tip over. I imagined myself squashed at the bottom of a pile of strangers, in a town called Middleofnowhere, Cambodia. My music saved me from insanity.

Next morning, we found ourselves on rusty old bicycles without gears, gripping grandma-style handlebars and smiling toothily into the passing wind. Siem Reap contrasts its surrounding countryside like Vegas contrasts the desert that surroundxs it. Enormous, glamourous hotels run by Koreans, Vietnamese, and French owners, streets lined with cookie cutter sidewalks, cleancrisp fountains...a city out of it's place. We rode down a palm and ficus lined boulevard toward our long anticipated destination: Angkor Wat.

When we paid our $20 to get into the ancient city, (lines of sweat dripping down our backs), we parked our bikes in the shade and dove into the intense sunlight. We decided that none of our pictures of eachother could be normal. Robbi, Karin, Peter and I either had to be jumping, the photo of us caught in mid-air, or dancing. Wandering around the crumbling edifices, though, I found myself forgetting tht I even had a camera - stumbling around in the rubble and trying to feel what the places might have felt like 900 years ago in their heyday. Gold. White. Shining. Busy. Elegant. And now - brown, rustred, stony-lipped faces crumbled in half, empty, and smelling of basement air.