quakerlicious

2008-09-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

2008-09-14T04:53:00.001-07:00

I'm currently at my Aunt Jo's house in Chesapeake, Virginia, enjoying the finest of Southern comfort. Yesterday when we rolled in she presented us with a mountainous quantity of chunk roast, peas, applesauce muffins, ice tea, baked potatoes, oatmeal raisin cookies, hot fudge, and ice cream. She has a truly delightful accent and the appropriate figures of speech to match--she's sweet as pie. On the way here we rolled past my great uncle D.D. Jones's trucking company (I think) and my great grandmother's house in colonial Williamsburg. Before that we'd been staying at Locust Grove in Walkerton, VA, where I used to go to family reunions (www.locustgrove1665.com). My Aunt Missy is wonderful; she's thinking of starting an organic herb farm there next year. Cecky is full of incredible stories from her theater tours and now I think spends most of her time making art related to Native American religions. Her mother, Harriet, was born to a deaf mother and father and thus learned sign language from birth--she didn't really learn how to speak until she went to school--and signed "Silent Night" for us before we went to bed.

To back track a little, I started the trip last Sunday when I biked from my house in Lutherville to Rebecca's in Takoma Park. I found my bike to be unbearably heavy on the hills and somehow got rid of about 20 pounds worth of stuff. The next day Kathrin, Rebecca, Hannah, and Whitney and I started out down the trails of DC, struggling with a lot of gear problems along the way and charming our way into finding people to fix them. We camped out in a bizarre swamp nature walk at Fort Belvoir and were woken up by army folk jogging by. Eventually the gals decided to call it a practice run, find new gear, and start over...but I continued on to meet up with Sam and Rachel at Locust Grove.

2008-09-06T00:29:00.001-07:00

Someone has already created my dream!

http://www.rhizomecollective.org

2008-08-28T01:30:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

This map is pretty lame (i.e. it's kind of city to city as the bird flies, as opposed to actually following a route). I just wanted to see if I could figure out this website stuff.

2008-08-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's official! On September 4th, we're leaving to bike to New Orleans. This plan has its origins in the rose-colored glasses that one acquires at camp. Upon more sober evaluation, we've come to the conclusion that goshdarnit it's a swell idea and dagnabbit we're going. "We" at this point includes Sam, Rachel, Jesse, and me, with the possible addition of three rad Guilford grads. It's a very affirming, positive-thinking group of "funemployed" young folks.

I just sent off a number of fund raising letters to close friends asking for donations to Sibley Bike Depot and its youth program (www.bikeped.org). There were so many enthusiastic kids wandering into the shop this spring that it became clear that we needed to come up with some sort of a structured program. Thus was born the Junior Mechanics program, in which kids pick out a donated bike and then take a four-week mechanics class and learn by fixing up their own rides. Afterwards they can come in and work aside adults at the normal volunteer hours. I really adore those kids. So, I'm hoping that by next February Sibley will have raised enough money through donations and bike sales to hire a part-time youth programs coordinator--a consistent face to be there for them.

I admit in the past I have scoffed at people who tour for a cause--why is fund raising on a bicycle any more effective than when one is stationary? The whole concept is still somewhat beyond me, but I decided to go for it anyway. Now, I'm beginning to understand the premise. The ride is an attention-getting device--some folks will turn their heads when they hear you're going on a bike tour, but almost no one will give a second glance to yet another pre-addressed donation envelope. The tour gives me more of an occasion to talk up the organization, and my appreciation grows every time I explain it. Knowing that the people I love and respect have donated to the project makes me care about it even more, and it gives me an avenue through which to build rapport with strangers. And I guess the fact that I've promised others that I'll reach my destination raises the stakes and makes it more likely that I'll make it over the last mountain pass (or the last bayou, in this case).

The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is that some charity rides seem to carry a variation on the "noble" sentiment, a certain pomp and circumstance or self-celebratory generosity. I am under no illusions about this--a bike tour is a pretty self-indulgent endeavor, in my book! I just wanted to jump at the opportunity to bolster an organization I hold dear.

2008-07-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

In my brain I have a collection of fantasy-land non-profits that I would like to a) exist b) work for or c) establish myself. They're sort of like dollhouses--sometimes I happen across a nice piece of intellectual 'furniture' in a magazine and then place it in the appropriate room in the appropriate non-profit in the desk of the appropriate employee. For example, "Oh wow! Vermiculture--what a great idea!At the Enviro-Responsibility Institute we should install a big compost with a glass wall where people can see the worms at work. Even better, we could have a live-in volunteer coordinator who would also live behind the glass wall, putting all of his own personal waste into the heap so that everyone could see humans as part of a complete ecological loop. The board of directors could all commit to having composting toilets and vermiculture at their house so that rich people would use them at their dinner parties and then the composting movement would spread like wildfire across the country!" These pieces of intellectual furniture are interchangeable between the various imaginary non-profits. Some are in vogue (socially responsible investing), some are pretty tacky (children's mural projects) some are damaged to varying degrees (the anti-sweatshop movement), and a few are blown to smithereens by some frustratingly excellent point made by an intellectual I admire (Noam Chomsky crushing anarcho-primitivism). Oh man i just used the "A" word in a blog--if i don't write in three days, it means the government goons have come to get me.

Anyway, during the hiking trip one of these non-profits rose to the surface as a potential priority. I would like to be a part of a neighborhood-based sustainability center in which people learn the importance of and methods for reducing dependence on outside resources, particularly oil. Working with Sibley really did convince me that learning about things is a great way to build community in a diverse neighborhood. There could be an urban farm, or at least a garden or two. There could also be a model house that has had all of the inexpensive improvements done (insulation; solar heating/cooling, simple cleaning products) and maybe a fund through which people could finance their own energy-saving home improvements. There could be an after school program where kids learn how to do all kinds of things, from gardening to bike mechanics to sewing to energy audits to cooking...there could be classes and film screenings explaining how everyone fits into the global economy...how much energy it takes to produce a pair of jeans, etc. Maybe there could be some field trips to the woods, to the sewage treatment plant, to city hall, to the ports downtown, to a dairy farm. Field trips taken in our very own bio- diesel school bus, painted appropriately. There will also be ponies, rainbows, and puppy dogs aplenty. In the meantime, I am eyeing the giant field behind the Superfresh on St. Paul street. Somehow, all of this seems like it would be easier to accomplish in Minneapolis. Why is it so damn cold there?

2008-05-31T00:10:00.001-07:00

I think I want a group tattoo. Maybe a few of us could get our favorite kitchen appliances emblazened across our chests. Anyone in?

The weather turned to Heaven a few weeks before finals. I started to resent my job, which kept me indoors on what are supposed to be the glory days of my youth. This is ridiculous, because it is a great job, and customers actually tell me how great my $8-an-hour lot in life is as they trot out the door on shmancy rides.

I had a dream in which I had two little babies. I started out in a very confrontationally triumphant mood about it; I was proud of the fact that I was twenty-two and decided to have those kiddos despite societal pressure to do otherwise; and I demanded that my aunts coo over them at family gatherings. Through the rest of it, though, I started asking my friends what they were up to, and their tales of Cambodia, bike trips and beyond made me unbearably conscious of the weight of the 18 years that lay before me...I realized that I would never be able to do anything I wanted to do. I have never been so happy to wake up from a dream! That led me to withdraw my applications from the jobs for which I'd been competing...I don't know what I am going to do, but I realized that I didn't want anxiety to be the force that propels me forward in my next direction. I need some time away from Mac to really figure out the way I operate outside of school.

Not having a plan is always exciting in theory, but very rarely in practice. However, I think I know what I am getting into, and as long as I feel prepared for one to two lonely months with my parents back in Baltimore, I can continue this way.

Senior week's canoe trip was stellar, the riverboat cruise was worthy of its reputation, and graduation actually made me cry. Walking past the Geography professors, through the applauding crowd...it hadn't occurred to me that I should actually be proud of myself. I was overwhelmed and flustered and snotty and happy. The president told me that the Sudan divestment proposal passed as he was handing me my diploma. Ah, closure.

I got to bring my family around to oggle at what I've been doing for the past four years and to bask in their approval. It makes me realize that yes, this apartment is sunny and yes my friends are interesting. I brough a greasy-handed bike mechanic to eat Ethiopian finger food with us, and my father was impressed. He was likewise impressed by the hydroelectric plant. Amanda and I had a barbecue among the lilacs with guitars and our dear dear friends, and my older brother did a blues rendition of the ingredients on the rice krispies treat package. I moved in with BenTonyJaredJoe, and suddenly my life was filled with fireworks and other pyromaniacal phenomena. It is so fun to live with them.

My feminist women's chorus gave me the big solo, which was very nice of them because I think that they see me as the inexperienced one and they want to encourage me.

We started the junior mechanics' certification after-school program, and the kids shine shine shine.

2008-04-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

The president passed the Sudan divestment proposal! This meeting was probably one of the most important of my time at Macalester, but I slept through my alarm and showed up fifteen minutes late in my pajamas, soaked to the bone from the pouring rain. The president happens to be a pretty compassionate soul, though, and is prepared to defend it in front of the Trustees. I have my fingers crossed.

I got to talk about the community banking scheme at a conference at Columbia University a few weeks ago. The Responsible Endowments Coalition is such an inspiring group of people--there is nothing wrong with getting sucked into the firey vortex of non-profit entrepreneurship. Visiting New York was mildly unsettling, though, because I saw a number of old friends who are really not so happy.

Saturday I went to the St. Paul Art Crawl, where all of the artists who live in subsidized studio apartments in the warehouse district open up their places to display everything they've got. It always inspires me because you can see the artist within their own living space, and sort of gain some insight as to how their work fits into their personal lives. A lot of the work is really nothing spectacular--some of it is downright atrocious--but you can see that you don't have to be anything special to be an artist. Art only requires the courage to embrace one's imperfection and withstand the criticism of the public. We watched people spin fire in the street and then made it across town to see Bladerunner. After Josh showed me Star Trek, I am reluctantly acknowledging the virtues of science fiction. Am I turning to the dark side?

Here is a second-hand quote from the mouth of Cynthia, a mechanic who helps to fix up bikes for people at the Center of Victims of Torture. One CVT client who had spent seven years in in an Iraqi jail said this:

“When I ride my bike I can go North, South, East or West. I can go as far as I want and as long as I want. And when I’m tired I can lay in the grass and look up at the sky.”

2008-04-17T22:07:00.002-07:00

I realized that I am always too afraid to actually share any of my song lyrics with anyone. Particularly in writing because a lot of things just need to be said out loud in order to avoid sounding trite. Read the song "Imagine" sometime and you'll know what I mean. Anyway, I have also decided that I want to take more risks in life and do things I otherwise don't do, so here goes--just about every song I've written. Because I really hate being cryptic, I've included artists' statements for them all. In chronological order, going backwards.

Written yesterday, about weighing the decision of staying in one place or moving on, deciding what to do next, as well as some more metaphysical mumbo jumbo:

Headlights flash the walls of my room
I've waited for God to come back home
When will I decide to fold
Place all of my bets on the unknown
I'll go gentle into that good night
Good night my friends good night

C Am
Out there on the road I realized
C Am
There is a dark space behind my eyes
F G C
I'd like to puncture the silver screen
F G C
Between me and everything
F G C
An inch wide a mile deep
An irreparable leak

chorus
C F C G C
But my Mississippi memories are just memories now
And my broken zipper jacket kept me warm somehow
C F Am G
I'd like to see what there is to see
But after a while even my suitcase feels like a ball and chain
I step outside myself and choreograph another revolution inside me

How can I break my chains
If I can feel them pulsing through my veins
The pavement here grows soft around my feet
I find it difficult to leave
But I'll shape the past into what I need
My lies will set me free

Chorus

***********************

Song about everyone in our apartment and our idealism (from a couple of weeks ago):

E A E A E A D A
I'm a demolition derby, kinda swervy, self-destructive and pretty curvy but
I say clear and loud, join me now
D
Maybe tomorrow we can stop the war
F C F C
I live on the high dive
F D G
And I always swallow fortune cookies whole

I'm a dumpster-loving vegan, take my chances, I notice all the sin that we are living in
But here me now, clear and loud
Maybe tomorrow we'll find something more
And I'm on the drive side; I'm threaded backwards so I won't fall out

We pick all our battles but we fight the good fight
And sooner or later we'll find out if we're right
They say good intentions are the sure way to hell
But surrender ideas and you surrender yourself

I'm a sappy sentimental fool, Always so enthused
About exactly what I'm still confused but I say
Clear and loud, join us now, maybe tomorrow we can save the world
Feel, feel me free wheel
I am coasting towards the great unknown below

chorus

I'm the guy that's sleeping on the couch,
Please don't kick me out
Maybe if i cut my hair you'd hear me out
But I say clear and loud, join us now
Maybe tomorrow you won't drive your car
Run, from the fiction of inevitable suburban white male life

Chorus

**************************************************

Song (kind of) about/for/to my Mom and wanting to make her proud and be close to her after i graduate and before we die

You said these clothes can turn me inside out
They put my deepest fear on my shallowest out
And now I feel I'm facing the future
Like a deer welcoming the headlights
Whether it's nature or nurture
Either way I'm idle at a green light
I've been told you're never too old
To break your mother's heart
But did you defy her gravity
Right from the start

I dreamed that scientists dug our backyard
They found our skeletons just as they are and
Now I just can't shake the feeling
That the ground is growing up around us
And as I pray to the cieling
The prayer I'm writing isn't all about us
My brow is knit, knits me together
I want to come undone
But am I brave, like you am I brave
Enough to be no one

Blow,
Blow, blow bugle blow
Because boy when you play, I melt into the ground

Telephone wires may break my fall
They tie us together like they tore us apart
From the time that I learned to speak
I've repeated whatever you have spoken
Is that my victory or defeat
Will the circle forever be unbroken

Your hallelujahs still echo through the attic
When my eurekas have all gone stale
Your sense of wonder could topple my Goliath
If I could only learn to exhale

chorus

You know that girl who works the turnpike toll
Watches thousands roll in and thousands they go
She knows the stream will flow beyond the day she takes her dying breath
Still she continues to reach out
Does she notice the lonely one that's left

Blow, blow
Blow bugle blow
Because boy when you play I melt into the ground

************************

Song written in November, when I got fed up with a) activism and b) arrogant philosophical talk, and decided that I was going to believe in God even if it doesn't make sense:

Bm C A E
Sometimes, sometimes my tracks are invisible
See my feet can't change these unlivable streets
Well I'd like to be seen
If I fall and no one's around
Do I, do I make a sound....Well i'd rather be seen
White lies, white flags, what's the difference when you're in the ambulance and that's what you need
Call me naieve, call me yellow, I might be dreaming but deep among the flowers on her grave, I saw a compass rose

G D C Em
I sure would like to be the simple kind of person that still believes

I quit, turned in my jersey, to all my fellow advocates of the devil i'm sorry, my apologies
My peace of mind isn't mine, the world was spinning so fast it made me dizzy and I fell down on my knees
I don't think it's so bad that I surrendered all the arrogance that I had

God loves me, he loves me not, the petals fall, I'm critical but
There's enough, there's enough to go around to go around

I cast my nets far and wide only to find that I'm the one who's hook line and sinker caught from the inside
My big mouth swallowed my pride; the sanctuary that seemed so arbitrary ain't so bad, they've got something right
I ran to the moral high ground because it feels like there's enough room to turn around

Don't get me wrong, I'm not so sure that our society's unexamined piety is healthy for our imperfect souls
Still I'd like an explanation; I can't remember how I got so familiar with all of these Great Unknowns

There's enough, there's enough to go around

*************************************************************

At the beginning of this year, returning from being abroad, about plans/people/ideas being uncertain:

I left the East to embrace the West
I expected applause for my confessions
I can show you how to pirouette as you evolve
If you can show me how to peel this flower off the wall
I like to think that my soul will rise up through Minnesota's open skies
Still, I'd like to know, are they as open as I was told

Darling won't you draw the blinds because
Every morning is a second try
I can show you how to miss someone before they're gone
If you can show me how to fake it all along
I like to think that I could recognize what's communicated by your eyes
Still, I'd like to know, was this as real as your eyes told me so

I'll conform to
What I'm told to
Until you rebel
But if our solutions are revolutions
Only time will tell

As time turns my curves to lines
Will my questions become my exclamations
I can show you how to know when you've figured it all out
If you can show me how to keep your foot out of your mouth
Every book I ever seem to start
Before I'm done they always fall apart
Still, I'd like to know, is this as true as those words told me so

chorus

I see you waving 'cross the river wide
I'll be the bridge across the great divide
Still, I'd like to know, is this as worth it as I was told

(did you get the part about the question mark and the exclamation point?)

***************************************************************

And the inevitable break-up songs, kind of jumbled up and not about one person:

Waitress please can I have some coffee
We laugh as she passes you by
My darling you speak so softly it's no wonder, no wonder why
Boy if you know what you want you are more fortunate than the rest of us
But what's the price of acting nonchalant, dignity ruins the best of us

All I wanted was to sift through your records
I find things you never knew you had
All of a sudden it seems I've worn out my welcome but
You said my omelettes weren't that bad

In April you always said that we could make out eight days a week
How were you such a good kisser with your tongue in your cheek
Well your doorbell's broken and you don't have a phone
And your front gate threatens to take a limb
Still I know that you're waiting for me
Your porch light's on even though it's dim

I can't pretend to be so complicated
Even though I like to think that I am
All I'd like is to drink champagne naked
Dance the foxtrot on the parking ramp

My crystal ball has gotten cloudy
Predicting the weather isn't my forte
If you want to know which way the wind is blowing
stick your hand out the window and see what you feel

My darling, I knew it was over it was over from the start
Oh darling the telephone's silence is enough to break my heart
Do you think that it's kinder to leave me hanging
Than to exit swiftly from this awkward doubt
What we'll both be thinking while the screen door's banging is
What the hell was this all about

Chorus

I don't know where we're going
You've got your hands on the wheel
I was content to wander but you were too good to be real

So chew your bagel
let the traffic roll past
Be here now and let go
Oh, all I know is, every hour we're growing old

Chorus

**************************************
sappy love song (i hate love songs, i am sad this came out of me)

C F
I am a hotel painting
Always entertaining sleepy strangers passing through
You're still a continent unexplored
you are the secret beneath my floorboards
I know that I don't need you, I never tried to please you, I know that I am happy alone

In photos I hid my shameful body from the judgement of the future
I am tearing out the sutures with these albums
Did you get the letter I never sent
Did you figure out that we're not meant to be
I know it's water under the bridge but I'd burn all my, I'd burn all my bridges for you

I just can't think about you so, I try not to think about you
Some things are sink or swim
But I'd jump back in again
It's like I'm breathing underwater
Breathing underwater

The sunlight spilled across the bedroom floor
I'm trying to clean it up with darker thoughts
Can't you see me hesitate at the door
Can't you feel our organs growing older
I know that I don't need you
I never tried to please you
I know that I am happy alone

Chorus
****************

one i wrote when i had a really bad day fall sophomore year and i wanted to go home

once again i was late this morning
pissed off my roommate and lost my keys
i'm sorry i forgot your birthday
all i produce are apologies

my god get me out of this place
or give me some of that amazing grace
what i'd do for a sense of direction
i once was lost, now i've run aground

winter's long here in minnesota
my heart is warmer when i'm back east
i know they say the grass is always greener
but there, there's grass at least

the road to hell is paved with good intentions
i've seen fire and some brimstone
i'm disappointed with my own reflection
the s cold november chills me to the bone

and then there's a happier verse but i don't remember what it is!

something about blooming where you're planted.

**********************************************

one more that i wrote at camp, about how sometimes other people can see beauty in your faults

Every time you're revved up you stall out
And you always wish that you'd shut your big fat mouth
They told you not to stare at the sun
And now it seems you're paying for all you've done
Oh I heard tell that you'd forgotten how to forgive yourself
Oh Breath deep because you can't see the forest for all the trees

you marvel at the goldfish in my pond
Do they do the same or just stare up at the great beyond
Oh have you found your reciprocal
And do you you ever wonder, a little
Oh your ships come in but they always set sail right back out again
Oh you were so close playing marco polo with your purpose

oh you mean, you mean, you mean a lot to me

every time i see a highway overpass sign
saying happy birthday or will you be mine
oh how i wish i could give one to you
but i never know where you've ben or where you're going to
oh let's roll to where patsy croons on the radio
oh let's go where the sweet summer air moves soft and slow

oh you mean, you mean, you mean a lot to me

*****************************************************
this one i'm very ashamed of, but i am being brave and putting it on here. i wrote it i think in high school after i read 'cat's cradle' by kurt vonnegut, kind of saying that we should all believe whatever we want to instead of searching for the truth because life is mroe pleasant that way

you woke up late this morning, saw the day was dawning and you panic because it's quarter to eight
but you let up on the gas because your clock's ten minutes fast
you trick yourself so you won't be late
*can't remember the next two lines*

believe what you need to rise gladly in the morning
believe what you need to have sweet dreams
beleive what you need to have a damn fine day
because these white lies are just too good to miss

when you're six feet underground you'll feel without a sound that you've been to see a two thumbs up movie
that played on a silver screen that was just the silver lining of a great big cloud that goes as far as you can see
do you remember the day when you convinced yourself that the monsters under your bed weren't real
well someday soon they'll be in your room asking hey man, what was the deal

well you've been rowing and rowing and rowing and rowing
your boat for so long you could scream
you'll rest your weary bones to realize all alone that this life was just a dream

my denial is not just a river in egypt
it surely belongs in my biography's manuscript
*****************************************************************
And the queen of cheesiness of them all, written when i was sixteen about learning how to not compare myself to other people. this is very tough; i am wincing as i write:

I've seen seventeen halloweens
i am sixty six inches tall
and i know that it's above average
but sometimes i don't feel that tall at all

i am more than the sum of my parts
there is gold in all our hearts

my area code is 410
and my shoe size is a nine
i've had seven state misdemeanors
but i'm really quite benign

i've got eleven freckles on my left arm
i sure do like two lumps in my tea
my BAC might be zero
but i'm not known for sobriety

2008-04-13T23:28:00.000-07:00

I just started a new job at a cooperatively-managed bike shop over in Minneapolis. I'm enjoying it; I really like the people there. They aren't pretentious, as one would guess. I am still not really convinced about the whole expensive bike thing, though. Sure, there are differences between parts, but usually not enough difference to really warrant a $1000 gap on the price tags. Nor do I really understand why people pride themselves on their knowledge of these expensive parts. Working at a store that definitely does not make bicycling accessible to people with less money makes me really appreciate Sibley. I understand how it fits into the scene a little better now.

I am sick of bikes!

In other news, I am about 95% sure that I want to put off the full-time internship/ career-starting move. If I can make the money work, I want to either go on a bike tour of organic farms around the US (maybe cross the country?) or travel in southeast asia and India. I admit that I am terrified. Seeing my friends around me take on jobs in high positions makes me anxious. I'm worried that I will drift around in a directionless, resume-damning funk for years if I don't hit the ground running. However, a dream I had last night makes me realize how precious my current freedom is--I can run off and do anything, with no time limit (only money limits) and no obligations to anyone but myself. I've never been in this position before, and I may never be in it again. I want to take advantage of it. I would like to think that as soon as this gets old, I will have both the will and the means to really really look for a job job. I know that I will not allow myself to grow stagnant. In truth I really only run the risk of ending up in my parents' basement, unhappy and alone for a few months before setting off on my power-woman path.

2008-03-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Today my friends locked themselves to the doors of a military recruiter's station, and I ended up standing by feeding them and tucking in blankets. The counter-protesters offered their jackets in an ostentatious display of their generosity of spirit. I often find myself at odds in these situations; negotiating my aversion to confrontation with my idealism, and somehow incorporating the brave yet diplomatic personality I would like to have, as well as the desire to win or maintain the respect of my peers. The police decided not to bother them, except to closely examine their chaining tactics in order to prepare for the coming RNC in St. Paul.

San Francisco proved to be just about all I dreamed of...it seems like a trap, because after you live there everything else would pale in comparison. I saw Josh at his outdoors school in the Pescadero Valley by the sea...it seems too good to be true. I don't know how one could really sustain that amount of energy over the course of a year. Josh walked into that job when he had absolutely no plans for after TA. Sometimes blindfolds are a good thing. Do I have the mental wherewithal to disappear into the wilderness for a year or two without a solid measure of my effect on the world? This type of ego-less endeavor is, in a way, something I aspire to. Even if I were to have some solid impact on policy in DC (...which probably wouldn't happen, anyway), I don't know if I would feel satisfied sending that energy off into space. Sooner or later you've got to bring home the BACON.

San Fran was also interesting in that we found ourselves in the company of so many rich people who work for Apple or for investment banks in London. Julia's uncle, with whom we stayed for a few days, is a professional dog-walker, bringing in upwards of $800/week. Her aunt is an organizer--she is paid to help people take control of the clutter in their homes, and she sneaks in a good deal of psychoanalysis along the way. We went wine tasting in the gorgeous Napa Valley on a sunny day. I am convinced that wine tasting is a crock. No wine is "choclatey" or "musky" or "with a hint of espresso at the end." Wine tasting, in my eyes, is another delightfully gigantic lie that has been blown way out of proportion over the centuries. Anyway, I marvel at the fact that such an elaborate economy can exist entirely for the purpose of meeting the superfluous needs of the wealthy. I know that the way I wrote that made me sound cynical, but I have started to try to marvel when I can without letting my misgivings affect my ability to value other people.

2008-03-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

the back of the Kansas quarter is definitely my favorite.

Yesterday the temperature here got up to 46 degrees, and everyone was bouncing off the walls. I was so excited about spring that I went on a long run and applied to work at a bike shop along the way. I have come to the realization that life does not become a matter of weighty decision--I am young and I have time to mess up big time. Head starts are for suckers, right? I am still sort of perplexed by middle-aged folks who manage to make upwards of $60,000 per year...how did so many manage the transition from directionless hippies "liberating" food from the grocery store to people who can actually stand on their own two feet (in brand-name dress shoes, no less?) I can't remember if I wrote about this before, but my brother convinced me awhile ago that we both had fallen for the biggest joke of all time: liberal arts. It's a mammoth white lie, and companies are expected to play along. "oh you've studied anthropology AND the solar system? why, you're well-rounded! we need people like you to give us the bigger picture!" HOW WAS I SO NAIEVE. It's tough, growing up as upper class white kids and going to an upper class white kid school give us this impression that somehow, some way, we will continue this sort of existence. Sure, there may be a long hiatus--a novel exploration of the depths of poverty during our twenties--but sooner or later we will eventually return to our roots. Or so we have come to believe. Forgive my relentless cynicism, I am a "latte-drinking liberal" after all.

I am only taking two classes, and I have discovered an entirely new existence at Macalester. I have time to do the things I say I am going to do, and I have fun doing them. Maaaaannnnn I don't know how I got roped into this bike shop thing, but it is so, so fun to meet all of these people all over the Cities who have so much enthusiasm and so many great ideas. Andy Singer, a big-deal bike cartoonist, was at our meeting and seemed mildly irritated that I was so excited to meet him. Darn, I forgot you're supposed to act casual around celebrities. Too often I am too transparent in my emotions (I think) but usually I don't have anything all that hideous to hide.

On Friday the school hosted a big formal dance, and everyone came out shining bright. I lost my phone, and someone turned it in with my lip balm scotch-taped to the outside. I love this place.

I am going to San Franciscoooooooooooooooooooo

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

Although I fear the wrath of the internet's watchdogs that may someday read this, I figure they already know one way or another that I went to a protest at Alliant Tech on Wednesday. Alliant Tech is the US's largest manufacturer of ammunition, including landmines, cluster bombs, and even some weapons using depleted uranium. We got horribly lost in the southers suburbs at 6:30 AM, but as late as we were all the old hippies were happy to see some young folks roll up. This is one place that I truly feel a weekly vigil is warranted, and I'm glad to join the ranks.

In other Old Hippy News, I just joined a feminist women's chorus. The group was founded by a gaggle of lesbians back in the 70s, and seems to have grown into a ridiculous, flamboyant, firey group of women of all ages. I am not a lesbian (yet?), but I think it will be great to be in the minority for once.

Jenna and I are applying for a grant to make an art bike and art trailer for a local arts organization. I am hoping it will be as sparkly and absurd as possible. Otherwise I've been trying to pull together this open house for Sibley--I'm really excited to be gathering so many bike folks from around the Twin Cities. I'm terrified of what I am getting myself into--an unprecedented amount of responsibility, I'm sure.

2008-02-13T23:42:00.001-08:00

During January I took a Wilderness First Responder class, which more or less teaches you how to take care of people when you're far away from a hospital. It lived up to its hardy reputation, complete with an extremely quotable Australian instructor. He dearly loved the gory makeup we would put on to simulate car crash wounds, and always egged us on with something akin to "A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE TODAY." The unfortunate consequence of this class is that I now live in constant fear of spinal injuries and femur fractures, and must restist the temptation to clutch strangers' jackets before they jaywalk across Snelling Avenue. Last week I was tabling for Oxfam at a DJ Shadow concert, and a 16 year old kid passed out in front of me. Before the class, I probably would have shrugged it off and figured he'd be alright (which is probably true...) but this time I packed him away behind our information desk, throttled him with questions about his hydration and discretely tried to test the responsiveness of his pupils. The end is always pretty fucking nigh.

The DJ Shadow concert also resulted in some mediocre dates that now leave me in the usual Unwanted Awkward Predicament on Valentine's Day. I hate Valentine's Day.

We had another jam session at our house last week, and it was an unrivaled success. There are so many talented people hiding in the woodworks of this place, waiting for someone to force them into the limelight. I myself love singing, but sometimes I clam up. We made everyone sing "I'll Fly Away" with far too many harmonies competing for the high notes. Life is really good at those times. It makes me quiver with fear about these times of nights, because graduation looms, and I am still too busy to hang out with anyone, and the end is pretty fucking nigh, and I am terrrified of being lonely wherever I happen to be in six months. It's tempting to leave that decision until after camp, when I am in high-adventure mode and will be disappointed by nothing. Except femur fractures.

The Geography department has come to be home sweet home, where the professors know far too much about my personal life. I judged a bunch of middle school geography projects at an ungodly 9 Am on Saturday. A number of the students' projects attributed the Earth's diversity to "God's Amazing Grace!!!" One boy asked me in earnest whether I believed in evolution, because he felt himself to be a persecuted minority, clinging tightly to his project on the development of primates. Last weekend on a Geography field trip we made it out to see the world's largest ball of twine.

2008-01-09T21:45:00.000-08:00

Went to DC yesterday. I turned in my application to work for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Very Incredible Big Deal non-profit that lobbies congress on just about every issue I care about, from climate change to Native Americans to the war. I was expecting the office to be cramped and hectic; instead it is a multi-million dollar Leed's certified green building, geo-thermally heated, with about forty employees. Working there is a great opportunity--as long as I don't let DC wrap its networking talons around me and devour my soul.

Which is, in fact, a very real possibility. I am cynical and judge good-looking people in suits. I was sitting there thinking "I could do this--I could feel important and STILL be a cool, fun person on the inside"--and then it dawned on me that every single person on the street has the same idea running through his head. I realized awhile ago that my desire to go to law school stemmed from a desire to feel legitimate and smart. Law school, in my eyes, is an outward manifestation of a very deep insecurity. I am beginning to see that many people make life decisions based on insecurity and fear. You have to be very brave to risk being a Nobody! I think that this is where those psalms about trusting God to clothe you and feed you come in.

Anyway, even my strong-willed friends that live in DC all seem to be worn thin by the culture there. They have had to work hard to carve an existence that resembles happiness. Which is true everywhere, but for some reason on this visit everything seemed to be dragged down...I don't know, it just feels like the whole place has something to prove. Conclusion: I could do the internship and lead an acceptably happy existence, but because I have a plethora of options before me, it is not looking very attractive at the moment.

Went on a 30-miler yesterday! Even the outer 'burbs can be beautiful when it's 65 degrees in January.

2007-12-28T01:09:00.000-08:00

I have a midlly irritating physiological tendency to always cry when I laugh, particularly at my own jokes.

I went 'hiking' with my brothers today, meaning we drove halfway up Sugarloaf, huffed and puffed the 400 feet to the summit, called it a day and patted ourselves on the back. It was a real Robson family accomplishment. For Christmas my dad got us all matching t-shirts that say "impeach bush" that surprisingly enough have not yet made their public debut.

2007-12-20T20:58:00.000-08:00

We just watched a Bollywood movie, and I started to realize that as my memories of slowly fade, I believe the movies more and more. When I saw "Munna Bhai" in Jaipur it seemed so saccharine and absurd; but from the other side of the world it seems as though that the sets could conceivably be somewhere in the vicinity of reality. Still, it makes me glad to remember that places like India exist; that the human race can stretch itself into such radically different manifestations; and that there are places in the world that will never be tamed. It was such a humbling experience to realize that humanity really is a force of its own and there is almost nothing we can do to keep its tidal wave from crashing down on the earth.

The fact that the roads here are so impossibly un-bikeable is eating me up inside. The thing that really bothers me is that I existed like this for my entire life barely giving climate change a sheepish nod...our house with its giant, uninsulated windows, our three cars, our complete lack of recognition for the existence of public transportation. One of my friends who's been living here for the past five years has never been to the Inner Harbor. I have never been on the Baltimore subway. It runs east-west instead of north/south; probably cited in some textbook as a reason why Baltimore is the most segregated city in America. All of a sudden the darkest parts of history seem so close to me that I feel anxious living within and contributing to a structure that has barely changed at all. Poor anxious me, needing to write about my guilt in my web journal, look how passionate I am.

Apparently, the only insurance company in Maryland that will insure a 1974 Citicar will do it for the ultra-low price of $900/year. The batteries, altogether, would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $800, and lord knows where I would find the brake parts (some obsolete model of airplane brakes). $2000 is completely out of my solar system. Stupid $65K cousins and their big fat solar systems.

Why do I stay up so late doing nothing on the internet

2007-12-17T14:46:00.001-08:00

I am flummoxed! Today, as I was triumphantly handing in my thesis, color-printed and professionally bound, I was informed that I failed to show up to a final exam this morning. No matter how much I try to evolve, I will forever remain a bewildered seven-year old with a backpack full of crumpled papers and string cheese wrappers.

Seven billion dollars for the Palestinians ought to do it, right?

2007-12-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

If Rose's departure is only slightly less than unbearable, graduation is going to leave me battered and broken.

Yesterday Nate picked up the guitar, Ben fiddled, and I sang out random pages of Emerson. This may be the penultimate cheesy siren song that calls out from my memory in days to come. It's pretty difficult to take a step back and look at things without laughing; the silence is awkward and I always want to pacify it with a smile.

"I wish I had the guts to be nobody"

2007-12-09T22:48:00.000-08:00

You know it was a good weekend when you have an eight-foot magic-marker rendition of a plague of locusts on your wall. The Apocalypse on Friday was Apocalyptic; and Emily and I butchered about as many social interactions as we facilitated. The next day I ended up helping Sibley move, once again, transferring the chaos of derailleurs and old three-speeds and awful giant bins of random parts to the new shop. It was pretty fun; for once I felt useful and warranted; it was zero degrees and we were busyclosing big heavy doors and banging around big heavy stuff. There is so much to be done there and all I can think about is painting the walls orange.

2007-12-07T00:28:00.000-08:00

Last year my friends tried to get the school to run a few of their vans off of biodiesel, and ended up getting a converter, a giant machine/filter thing that can change vegetable oil into diesel fuel. However, their neighbors saw it sitting in the garage and thought it was a meth lab, and thus put them under investigation. The joke's on them, though, the REAL meth lab is in the basement.

This has caused me to recall the Cheese Car, my father's 1974 Citicar (electric!) sitting sadly in our garage waiting for me to show up in shinging armour and rescue it. If I move back home next year, that is going to be project Numero Uno. For sure. I wonder if I'm smart enough.

It takes awhile to realize in the cold weather sometimes, but I am very happy here.

2007-11-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

At Thanksgiving, I learned that my cousin has been the captain of his riflery team for the past three years. I also learned that my great grandfather was the head of the big D.D. Jones trucking company in Norfolk. DD stands for "Darling Divine." There are a few large estates owned by old English families with those names, so in the South their descendants started to name their children "Darling" and "Divine" in the hopes that they could end up with their proper English inheritance someday. Southern family ties are so arcane.

My other cousin, who has been in graduate school studying the link between Javanese and Sanskrit for about two years, is now thinking about dropping out because it "isn't relevant." My cousin Liz, one of my best friends growing up, has a job lined up after graduation to be an actuary for an insurance company receiving $65,000/year. That makes the third one of my friends making upwards of 60K. When I started to sulk about my lack of direction my brother smacked me upside the head and told me that coming from Towson High school I had to make a very conscious decision in order to Not make that much money. He's right. I've always been the righteous hippy of the family, now everyone else gets to have the last laugh when they as me what I'm doing and I say I'm planning on joining the circus. My uncle started complaining about "those damn pollution cleanup laws" and how he now more or less owns the side of a very dirty mountain in Utah. My aunt, to break the awkward silence, started talking about her water aerobics class, and in response my father piped up with "I just read about some water an-aerobics classes they're giving down in Guantanamo."

Last week we had a general strike against the war at Macalester. It was amazing that 400 people showed up; and it also was disappointing that 400 people showed up. It is true: we don't have to sacrifice anything for this war. We don't even have to suffer a guilty conscience if we just don't read the newspaper. I'm sure that in fifty years Iraq will look like one of the more barbaric periods of United States history. Afterwards we staged a protest of about 100 people at a major intersection. We started to block it, drivers got angry, the police came, and the poor dean of students had to come and negotiate with all of them. I don't know, with my research about Sudan and Iraq and the carbon sinks, I just don't want anything to do with petroleum anymore. Flying home I felt dirty knowing how much was fun stuff coming out of the airplane's engines. I wonder how long I'll have to feel guilty before I really figure something out.

This is cool:http://www.planetizen.com/node/24990. California is suing its muncipalities for the greenhouse gas emissions caused by suburban sprawl.

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

E.B. White

2007-11-16T01:48:00.000-08:00

Amelia has a yellow living room with traces of hunting decor, a wood stove, a french press, a banjo, and an entire bedroom with an underwater theme. I don't think I've ever been so enamored with someone else's material culture in my life. When we blustered into Iowa City with the Minnesota wind at our backs, we were greeted by a rendition of "Crimson and Clover" on bass, accordian, guitar, banjo, and musical saw. We ate shot-dead rabbit in ballroom gowns at suppertime, and photographed ourselves doing it. The lifestyle she has crafted out of the hodge-podge and cornfields of the mid-West proves that there is no excuse for disenchantment with life.

The next day we made marzipanimals, which had me convinced that this recurring motif is some sort of a sign from the powers that be--my spirit animal is the marzipanimal. Holly and Megan also made it out from Chicago...somehow all of them have made these so-fun-they-can't-possibly-be-meaningful endeavors into eerily effective ways of influencing others. It'd be nice to document my metamorphosis from a critic to a believer in art; I guess I've still got aways to go in that regard, but my course is charted. Talking to Moana the plant scientist about the micro-something-isms that she studies, as well as the philosophical underpinnings of her interest, has reminded me, as I often need to be, that the world is full of pages left unturned and every pair of eyes reads something totally unique in every landscape.

My old boss told me once that in life it's easy to criticize, but you are more effective if you figure out what you are for instead of what you're against. That was paraphrased rather awkwardly, but in the past few days it has click-click-clicked. If anything, this school has taught me to articulate opinions--and now I'm trying to concentrate on withholding judgement. It's important to take a stand, but I think all too often I have merely accepted whatever opinion that I, as a liberal, ought to have emblazened on my chest. I fly the liberal flag and recite the liberal pledge of allegiance and march lock-step to the "beat of my own drummer."

If anything, being abroad sort of taught me that disconcerting statistics are probably the wrong basis for a career. I don't really believe anymore that there are some people who make a difference and some people who don't; nor that this difference can be measured in numbers or prestige; or if it can even be witnessed by others in the first place. I don't really believe that a poor farmer is making less of a difference than the head of the World Bank. The World Bank may be wider-spread, but in the end his influence can only be a mile wide and an inch deep. Not that one is better than the other. Simply re-phrasing life's mission from "alleviating suffering" to "creating joy" has worked wonders on my ability to go to sleep at night.

Gumdrops of grandeur in DC, sugarplums of organic farms in Portland dance through my head.

Today I finally presented the Sudan Divestment proposal to the committee, and the sniper who I was expecting to shoot it down with a few curt remarks actually pulled me aside and whispered that it was "very good." I jumped for joy. I think working with Jimmy, who is from Sudan, at my side has helped so much...sometimes it feels arcane to be advocating on the behalf of a friend when your only perception of a situation is in terrifying headlines and not shared experience.

2007-11-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

I am proctoring an exam. It makes me feel important. I passed out Starbursts, which is a deliberate and undisguised attempt to win the favor of the class. Soon the world will be mine. The Proctologist conquers all.

Over the course of hte past month, I have managed to help fix something like ten or twelve bikes, and I've managed to damage about twice that number. The ratios are getting worse and worse as I venture further into bottom brackets and hubs. The community class that I'm taking down at Sibley is pretty great; there are a few high quality old ladies with whom to banter and cackle. One is convinced that the best way to get people to stop driving is to get Oprah to go on a tour, and suggests that the revolution is impossible without her. The other talks about her Reiki energy therapist as she nibbles Kentucky Fried Chicken. I'm sort of conflicted about how to spend my time; that place has so much potential, could be really great for that neighborhood, but I, unfortunately have no idea what I'll be doing with my life. The subtle desire to feel recognizably legitimate and smart is an irritating voice to have whispering in your ear; it led me to consider dumb things like law school and Fulbrights for far too long.

2007-11-04T20:57:00.001-08:00

I went to a conference on socially responsible investing in Philadelphia last weekend; this time with two other Mac students and a story of triumph under my arm. It was deeply satisfying to present among other successes and to be flattered by other students attempting community banking schemes off of "The Macalester Model," but I felt guilty receiving credit for something that took so much work on the part of the administration. In any case, it meant a lot to me to show the folks who inspired me in the first place that they truly are having an effect on the world.

What stood out about the weekend was staying at the house of the people who started the Responsible Endowments Coalition, a few twenty-somethings that I really admire for their bravery and diligence in founding the 'movement.' I saw that they are scattered and unfocused like me. They aren't necessarily machines of efficiency; they leave papers for the last minute in favor of making animals out of marzipan, Afro-Cuban dancing, and conversations about poop. Ryan's attic seemed to be an archeological testament to fleeting passions come and gone; Eurekas gone stale, like so many garages and basements tend to become...pottery wheels, scuba gear, bike parts, yerba mate pots, protest signs, herb gardens, harmonicas, Esperanto...successful people have also seen many dead-ends and failures. I often get down on myself for not being focused enough and think that if I could only choose one thing on which to spend my energy, I could make a dent. But varied interests truly do feed into one another to make you a more effective and whole person; it was so clear that Morgan's singing contributed to her confidence in communicating with others and her strength in the face of uncertainty. Someone flattered me by saying that our voices and mannerisms were similar, so I drooled over her mouth contortions for the rest of the weekend. Anyway, that's beside the point: Didn't Ben Franklin both help found the United States AND discover electricity? Wouldn't Thomas Edison's garage be even more shameful than my father's? I guess I just started to feel a lot better about the way that I live my life.

It is likewise enlightening to have friends who "have it together" to remind me that ducks in a row aren't necessarily what would make me happy. Sometimes I convince myself that if I could wake up on time, if I would do all of my reading, if I were skinny and wore nicer clothes, if I kept in touch with my Grandmother, if I practiced the banjo every day, if I had a boyfriend instead of romantic ambiguities, if I had a plan for after graduation--I would be more satisfied with life. NOT TRUE. (the capitals are indeed warranted.) Empirical evidence demonstrates that I am significantly happier than many of my more composed acquaintances.

This summer I became so confident in my ability to be happy when I'm by myself that I built a healthy habit of passing up relationships that promise to be anything less than mutually beneficial. I am proud and feel like telling the whole cyber-world. Girl power.

Speaking of girl power. I was recently convinced to join the board of a non-profit community bike shop. Jason is headed South for the winter, leaving behind three gray-haired old men and me to bicker in the cold. Today I contra-danced with an over-the-hill kook in an eighties t-shirt and last week I babysat for a Quaker meeting group that concluded with a children's activity that involved wearing diapers on our heads. I guess it takes a kook to know a kook.

2007-10-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

God damnit! Why does it feel like I have these patterns of thoughts and feelings and relationships taht I haven't ever, ever been able to shake? Why is it that no matter how many resolutions I make, the bottom of my closet is always an unintelligible pile of shit, and my subconscious feels about the same? I just sat down to my guitar to try and write something that doesn't sound exactly like something I would write and I got so frustrated I ahd to run to my computer. Not helping. A little while ago I was sort of feeling as though I'd achieved some sort of harmony in life, composed of good friends, sunshiney bike rides to the farmers market, appropriate and successful attempts to get the school to divest from Sudan, satisfying classes. It always feels like not enough and too much at the same time

Maybe this bad henna hair dye job can help convince me that I've managed to evolve as a person since I was sixteen.

These stagnant periods waiting for people to show up here at my apartment on Saturday nights are very dangerous times indeed.

Some sleezy guy yesterday was sizing me up, and attempting to tell me everything about myself. He figured that I had an older borther and a younger brother and that my dad was divorced right off the bat, and then from the fact that I was from Macalester and doing an all-women's alley cat race told him that I had a desire to break free of my confining and shameful bourgeoisie past, but I was unfortunately good girl at heart and there was nothing I could do about it. Fuck him.

2007-10-07T23:28:00.001-07:00

Saturday around five I thundered down Summit Avenue in a cycle taxi, awash in sunshine, fall leaves, and purpose. Thank God the light at the bottom of Ramsey hill was green; I would have ploughed right through those SUVs and they'd never know what hit them. My chariot of fire, that's what. The other day we decided that our bike group would borrow a cycle taxi from a shop downtown and trundle visiting parents around campus to raise money for the aforementioned friend who is going on a tour across South America. Mark and I trudged it up it up Minnesota's one and only Big Ass Hill in its lowest gear, inciting honks of approval from passing cars and hoots and hollers from children in school buses. A guy in a motorcycle told me that I was "illegal." Is that true? I made a point of attaching balloons to the back (...actually, the balloons were he whole reason I wanted to do it in the first place). We didn't manage to raise a fortune, but it was exactly the kind of interaction with other human beings I desire in life.

Lately I've been so googley-eyed about the worthy things that people do with their lives. I've been very fortunate to be so surrounded by positive and enthusiastic folks. There is still so much to be admired; I haven't had such a profound and sustained sense of wonder in a long time. What I've been finding, too, is that often the things we do don't match up with our theoretical priorities. You just have to go with your gut reactions to the resources and issues laid before you and do whatever it is you can muster up the motivation to do. Rational and moral conviction behind these things are always nice, but when it comes down to it, you will never do anything that your gumption doesn't agree with.

I've been having those old familiar feelings of heaviness and exasperation as I scowl at my stupid planner; it always seems like every I know exactly where I'll be for every minute of the next two weeks. Even though the things I"m doing feel good, it gets to be kind of suffocating when i can't even scrounge up the time to yell at myself to do laundry. But what I have learned in the past year is that it's silly to feel anxious about plans, because plans never hold up in the first place--the planner is an illusion! All you have is the present! Fate still manages to defeat even the most resolute agenda addicts. School, I think, can take up an infinite amount of time. You have to beat it back with a stick, or preferably a frisbee. My youth will not be spent indoors. No magna cum laude here, I've got plenty of my own laude, thank you very much.

2007-10-07T12:03:00.001-07:00

[T]here is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. [...] No matter what the angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.

This escape from history is one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more than the material world of physical nature. [...] Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism's most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. [...] Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity [...] the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are--or ought to be.

But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean slate from our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living--urban folk for whom food comes from a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.

William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

2007-09-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

I think I've decided to stop feeling sheepish about believing in God. I don't really have any apologies about it; everyone has inconsistencies in their world views. Show me someone who's built their house on a rock, and I show you a rock that's going to turn to sand sooner or later. You could just not build a house at all, maybe, but what sort of a life is that? Home Depot stocks would plummet, the real estate bubble would burst, and Alan Greenspan would STILL not give a shit.

The other night one of my friends got into an argument about whether or not the Catholic church should actively discourage the use of condoms and other birth control. In the end it sort of came down to the idea that the church, if it is to be a moral institution, ought to be consitent in its arguments--and it is. The problem is that many of us have a different organization of priorities and values; I happen to believe that it is better for someone's physical being to be free of HIV than for their soul to be saved. I can't put words into their mouths, of course, but I think it's safe to say that Catholics might think that eternal damnation is a shade worse than hepatitis. I have plenty of half-assed convictions, but I still consumer my not-so-fair share of fossil fuels, eat tomatoes that were probably picked by desperate people, don't call my parents often enough, neglect to answer emails, AND I never, ever return library books on time.

We saw Prairie Home Companion last week and I came away convinced that the thing I need most in life is probably an autoharp. It was hilarious how well Garrison Kiellor and his folks know his audience. His impressions of kids in the car whining for Mom to turn off NPR hit eerily close to home--and hit even more eerily close to the assertion that I am slowly turning into my oppressors--one day I will be my mother.

Potlucks have thus far been exquisite and ended in singalongs.

2007-09-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

Things are going bump in the night! Shit! Here comes the future! I am responding to fellowship deadlines like a deer in the headlights. Today was the first really craptastic rainy day in the Twin Cities, and even though i had a great time lounging around on the couch with Jon and Charles, it made me start to think seriously about what's going to happen when it's time to make like a banana and split. Actually, I still have faith that if I do not very much right now I'll still turn out okay; it's just that I don't want to neglect great opportunities like the Watson just because I couldn't get my act together.

Went to another peace protest on Sunday. Protests here in the Twin Cities are small and heartening compared to the tumultuous crowds of DC. For some reason that day I was particularly irked by the fuzzy messages sent by conflicting signs, chants having to do with fascism and flags that proclaimed nothing more than rainbows. When you are trying to convey the clear message of "bring the troops home now," I no longer feel that it is productive to use symbols like that...having rainbows on your side automatically antagonizes those with whom you're trying to reckon as "anti-rainbow." It's like responding to a fire with calls for "justice" instead of bringing water. Although I relish the motley that shows up, and the comraderie that tends to grow, I sort of would like to make certain protests a venue where the "normal" people can show their faces without being ashamed or associated with unbathed bearded men shouting profanities. I think the very "liberalness" of liberal movements stands to scare away many would-be followers. I also went to a bike film festival on Friday. There was one particularly long one that had people in black sweatshirts bike really fast through construction sites, up one way streets the wrong way, and whizzing past disgruntled pedestrians while loud punk music blared through the speakers. Don't get me wrong, it was really cool, but if the bike movement wants to be taken seriously, we can't say that "taking back the streets" means acting like a jerk. Otherwise, bikes are the shit, and even though I groan about how much time this job has taken thus far, I wear my cuts and bruises and bike grease with pride. My friend Claire, who managed to make every program she touched bloom and flourish into something incredible, is going to be biking from Santiago to Quito (4000 km) on a grand tour of schools and villages to talk about climate justice. Damn.

2007-09-07T23:34:00.000-07:00

Contrary to what I'm supposed to be feeling, I've been ecstatic to be here at Macalester, and it's hard to believe that I was back in Baltimore just a week ago. I guess I was getting kind of tired of extending olive branches that didn't really need to be extended in the first place to people who weren't there anymore. Somehow whenever I go home I'm so happy to be with my family, but always so restless, so frustrated that I need a car and a premeditated plan to see anyone I know that it is a relief to leave. It hurts that I just wrote that. If I were to re-start in Baltimore on a clean slate, to manage to meet the same kinds of people I met at the bike coop instead of re-kindling half-assed relationships with the ranks of Towson graduates, it is indeed possible that I could be happy there. After this summer, and realizing that certain parts of Baltimore are the US's version of the third world, and that internationalism is just a bunch of ego and exoticism all bundled up with a bunch of otherwise useless crap...I don't know, it would be pretty gratifying to go back there, be satisfied with life, and make a little change. Something about that kind of hits the spot. Then again, the west coast calls. Bus something always calls, I guess. I've been writing yet another stupid guitar song to that effect. I may regret it in a few weeks. As I often do. It seems like my more honest portrayals of my loser-dome are my more popular songs. My latest rebellion has involved a protest against alienating language. I am convinced that any concept can be conveyed in simple language, eventualy...good vocabulary is just a shortcut. When I was nine I tried to learn Esperanto (I really thought that it would save the world someday), and the only phrase I remember is "you are an ugly camel."

They made the work study position I created! After our short-lived triumph over Coca-Cola and the community banking towards the end of sophomore year, I was worried that it would all go to shit after I left. And I had thought it did, until I discovered that they did indeed creat the jobs (not one, but two!) and they have moved half a million dollars to a community bank. I am excited, to the point that I mutter it to people who obviously don't care or don't understand what I'm talking about. That's the way life is. Most of the time, people don't care--and--most of the time, you don't really care either. Maybe not caring and not understanding things are one and the same. We're doomed. In any case the social responsibility stuff is back, I have a seat on the committee, and the piece of my life here that had been missing has returned with a vengeance. Around this time of the week I am always debating about whether or not to go to Quaker meeting. I guess I better. Right now I'm craving whatever routine I might concievably cling to, and am even more clingy to the people that might come to represent consistent companionship here...there are plenty of people to meet, but I've lost my willingness to cast my nets far and wide. I'd rather go ice fishing.

2007-08-21T21:02:00.001-07:00

When I was waiting for yet another bus, I met a Swiss woman who had been working for the government coordinating the incoming refugees from Yugoslavia during the war. When i said taht I'd been in Geneva and Kosovo, she asked if I'd gone to any of those "wild NGO parties." I didn't know what she was talking about, and after she foudn out taht I'd been visiting someone who was from there she said "...well, you know, NGOs can be good and all...but there are more than 270 of them in Bosnia. All I can say is that there are a lot of people who have nothing but good deeds to profess who have made a lot of money off of that war." One guy who'd been working for the Quaker officein Geneva had turned down far better paying jobs in the interest of working for that office. When it turned out that his daughter needed a very expensive heart surgery, he felt as though his disregard for money had translated into neglect for his family. It's awful; I really think that our physical and educational wellbeing should not be dependent on our parents' unfaltering drive to make money.

My aunts and uncles all share a house on the Chesapeake that they all inherited from my grandfather. It was built in the 1920's and had faucets and door handles over which I was irrationally sentimental. It was quaint and simple, with a few pieces of decidedly un-groovy 1970's furniture, tacky fish napkin rings, and sea-related romance novels. This afternoon I got my brief on the silent yet costly war being waged over the house's interior: sweat equity to make it comfortable vs. allegiance to Williams & Sonoma to make it impressive to judgemental visitors. I am impossible to consult in these battles because I obviously don't have a good sense of which color schemes are important in life--if the upholstery were up to me I would surely disgrace to the family name.

My feelings about the excesses of the States are about the same as before. I personally think that too much cynical energy (my own included) has been devoted to bemoaning the obnoxious lifestyles of the upper middle class on the behalf of the "less fortunate." A lot of people would consider themselves "more fortunate" to not own a ride-on lawnmower. Yes, certain things are important (health care, for example), but beyond a certain minimum, inequality isn't such a big deal. The way I see it, there is a double sided myth about money and how much it makes your life more satisfying. Those of us who have it have been told over and over how fortunate we are to have all this stuff, so we think that them foreigners must have it pretty rough. The truth is, the quality of happiness on the other side of the income fence is about the same, but those people have heard this same myth, so those who ar leading more or less fulfilling lives believe that they're missing out on something fantastic.

I said something [stupid] to this effect in Quaker meeting this morning, and an old guy came up to me and said "You know, whether your rich or poor, it's always nice to have a little money" and cackled and hobbled off to the apple juice.

I hung out with a few of my favorite antique hippies: one was a concientious objector during World War II and the other went to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee back in the day. Not that those are the only reasons they are cool. When I say I'm graduating soon people start giving me contact information, and career advice. These two had assured me of their connections far and wide with NGOs, but later at a dinner party someone else was telling me I ought to shoot for T. Rowe Price or Google because they have rad company trips to the waterpark.

Cowabunga?

Actually the thing that's been bothering me is how much it is necessary to drive a car. Dependence on fossil fuel is another bullet on the list of crap wrong with the world that we Americans consider worth lamenting in newspaper columns but too overwhelming to actually make a difference. Climate change has rocketed to the top of my list of priorities, and it is bothering me that carbon emissions are neither a forethought nor an afterthought in any of the decisions we make about where to buy a house, where to get groceries, which car to drive, or even whether or not to include a bike lane on a road. It's true, our landscape leaves us with very few options and we are obliged to drive, but it seems like that has led us to shrug helplessly and step on the gas. Personally I'm scared shitless, and I'm glad I'll be working at this bike coop to at least sooth my guilt.

I started volunteering at Baltimore's bike coooperative, and that place has me thinking that this city has a community strong enough and quirky enough that I could really love living here. I guess I, like many human beings, live for the shit that never

2007-08-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Home! In Baltimore! According to the normal study abroad doctrine I'm supposed to be culture-shocked or depressed or something, but that seems to be a disease for sissies whose only cure is a sound slap in the face. I am drinking my favorite juice, my "little" 200-pound brother is playing video games, there are begonias in full bloom on the front porch and I slept in my own bed. So nice. My folks are good folk.

I guess to start off where I left off before,I took the overnight bus back to Istanbul and rode around on the $2 public ferry all around the Bosphorus. That city is so hip--they've created clubs in the middle of the water, little islands with pools and dance floors and restaurants for the ultra-elite. There was no bus straight from Istanbul to Prishtina, so I took a far more circuitous route that took three days. On the overnight bus from Istanbul to Sofia, Bulgaria, I sat next to an Australian film student who had been teaching English in Poland for a few months. Apparently in Poland almost all of the films are dubbed by the same actor who speaks in a complete monotone and never changes the pitch of his voice between men and women. When he said he played the banjo, I figured that we would probably get married. The process of crossing the border took from midnight until 4:15 AM, involving a lot of getting on the bus, getting off the bus, unpacking our luggage for inspection, re-packing our luggage for inspection, turning in passports, answering questions, blah blah blah. We were the only non-natives on the bus, and people kept demanding our passports for things. As it turns out, twice they were just other passengers using our passports to buy two extra quota's worth of the duty-free cigarettes available at the border, and forced us to lug around about eighty packs of cigarettes until the border police were gone. We spent quite awhile in dimly lit warehouse, standing by our luggage with no bus. There were a few animal cadavers in the corners and mice would scramble in and out between the bags if people were carrying food. When we finally made it to Sofia, I couldn't decipher the Cyrillic alphabet to find the next bus, so Australian guy and I ended up passing out in the garden of a hostel(an old commy building that had been "renovated" by a bunch of art students) until they gave us beds. In the mean time, I met two more Norwegians (Norwegians really are God's most hilarious gift to humanity) and a Mexican literature teacher/director, and I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to marry all of them. After we'd met up with a couple of extremely vulgar British primary school teachers, we all headed out to display our backpackers' chic in the hottest dance spots in town. It was difficult for us to distinguish which were respectable joints and which weren't because of the way women were dressed nearly everywhere. Sofia itself is difficult to describe...it's as though someone had re-done "Pleasantville" in cement Soviet architecture, and peppered around a few mosques and statues for a touch of culture. I dunno, I was just passing through.

On the next bus I met a couple of Brits who were wandering around looking for a place to open up a hostel. I gave them my guidebook, and they were so grateful that they saved me after our bus broke down and I was stranded with no place to stay. The next day one of their friends, a Spanish guy who worked at the embassy in Sofia, came to Prishtina with me and followed me and Bardhi and Joe around for a day. He was so fascinated with everything, questioned every phone number area code and ice cream flavor as some sort of hidden political or historical message. I still think that the ability to be fascinated is one of the most desirable ualities you can find in people.

2007-08-10T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'm in Bardhi's Prishtina apartment in Kosova. Prishtina is so hip, it ought to be named Poshtina, and I feel like I am here just to make everyone else look even better. Bardhi's song-writer friend Joe, a Mormon from Utah, is caterwauling from the next room. We have all been doing very little since we arrived, eating plenty of chocolate with unfamiliar labels that have dots over the vowels, passing judgement on every soul who is unfortunate enough to amble past our balcony. Personally I think life is pretty good.

They say that Kosovars are among the most optimistic people in the world. Around the city you can see the evolution of people's attitudes towards the future, ranging from ambitious construction projects that ache with potential, to train tracks tied down by weeds, to freshly-fenced in gardens at the embassies on the hill, to a church boarded up with a welcoming display of barbed wire around the doors, to a gallery full of smiling clay-covered people washing in and out of the doors. Everyone, though, is pissed about how many promises of independence have been broken over the past ten years. It isn't easy to stay positive for such a long time, and the energy to protest is gradually stagnating as every ultimatum is violated and as every deadline passes.

Bardhi is brilliant. It's so affirming to see the people you knew were going somewhere in another place. His friends are hilarious and have tolerated our stuttering attempts at Albanian proverbs. A couple of them put Joe on the radio the other night, and had me tell stale jokes in an incomprehensible Southern accent. I don't think I was funny, but they say I was funny "for a girl." Bah! "Te ha dreqi! May the devil eat it!"

Why aren't girls funny?

Admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.

It's been a long way coming here. I'm sure no one reads this anymore. I'm always surprised when people have. THANK YOU, DEDICATED READERS! While I was in Geneva, I met a nice guy from Seattle who was biking his way across Switzerland on his way to the tomato festival in Spain. He stuck around until my program ended, but life is life and his plans to come to Eastern Europe with me were defeated by logistics--which as it turns out was decidedly for the best. In Geneva, my friend Ali and I had planned on hiking for a few days, but her budding romance with an Indian guy from the Center for Disarmament steered us in the direction of a couple of barbecues and a reggae festival in the neighborhood. His friends were interesting, intelligent, multi-lingual, good-looking, and fun--as the Geneva crowd is rumored to be. The nice thing was that they were also very open and welcomed us into their folds right off the bat--I found myself rocketing past the Jet d'Eau in a grocery cart as we searched for space in a public park to pitch a tent. Nikhil graciously allowed us to set up camp in his basement, and we ended up staying a long while...his mother is gracefully inspiring. His father works for the UN Office of Telecommunications, and he had really provocative to say about the media and the US's control over the internet as he barbecued us Grade-A Organic pork. He spent some time making documentaries--one of them, called "Sacred and Profane," was about how someone painted a stretch of the Himalayas green after the forest had died--because the president was due to fly his plane over. My father, coincidentally, has also made a documentary called "Sacred and Profane," but I don't know what it was about. I am starting to think that, if I really get my priorities straight, I'll be going full-steam doing something about global warming. We all ought to...Kosova has no snow for the kids to sled anymore, and not enough water in the summer to keep the parks anything but yellow-brown. It rained a lot on the night of the reggae festival. Someone brought out a giant tarp into the crowd, and Michel and I ended up crunched into a an accidental mosh pit underneath pulsating plastic. We hung out with some professional festival-goers who had a generator, huge sound system, and the works connected to their two VW buses and circus-sized tent until the first bus back into town at sunrise.

My wallet was stolen in Geneva, above-mentioned friend from Seattle bailed me out, and I made it to Stefano's house in Milan. It was great to see him again--it made it feel like we were old friends and that it wasn't all that unlikely that we'll see eachother again someday. We had cheese and peach ice tea on Montevecchio, watermelon at a stand illegally established on a road median, and then he showed me his age-old hang out spot. The first generation pub, the "Honky Tonky," was shut down by the local muncipality after repeated noise complaints, the last of which was delivered by the police during a toga party to a very naked owner. The governments decision to shut down its successor, the "Train Blues" (as goes the song), for the same reason, was met by a protest in front of city hall and a party with free beer in the middle of the intersection in front of the bar. Stefano is set to work at the third venue, somewhat less creatively christened the 'Saloon.'It's so good to see him jostling all of his pre-school friends--some people manage to bloom where they're planted. Green with envy! Bardhi, after all these years, says he thought I didn't have much in common with my friends in high school. ???WHAT???MY WORLD IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN!!!#$%@((*7!!!

Istanbul (NOT CONSTANTINOPLE) was everything that I had hoped--last year I even made a website about it for Lanegran's class. I am wincing as I type the address: http://www.macalester.edu/geography/courses/geog261/lvrobson/index.htm
On my first night there, after a nice, cheap rooftop sunset dinner an Australian doctor girl and I were invited to mix with the Turkish gay scene by two very stylish middle-aged men and a throng of open-minded straight couples. They took us out seafood at a pricey joint, where they paid a gypsy band to play old dirges to which they could wail along...the more portly of the two guys tossed money around like confetti, and stuffed 20 Euro notes up the bell of the clarinet. Afterwards they took us to the famed Reina club under the bridge across the Bosphorus, complete with hot-pink chandalieres and jet-set crowd standing around like so much furniture. Rumor has it that Paris Hilton was there a few weeks ago. Rumor also has it that they paid something like $90 for each of us to go in because we were dressed in our Backpacker's Best (artfully stained jeans and classily-casual flip flops). We took a cab home. The other party was pulled over by the police for their creative driving, but they let him off because 'his computer was broken,' probably because he dropped a fistful of money on it. To top it all off, while we were eating a peacful dinner out the next night, in wandered Portly Gay Man #1 with his wife. Bam!

I also managed to befriend a few of the employees at a local cafe (the kind of people who do nothing but befriend strangers all day long, so it wasn't really me who did the befriending) and spent a long time talking about how to find direction in life. I suspect that my fate will be simlar to theirs. We gathered wisdom from a tattooed man of about fifty with breezy blonde hair. As it turned out, he actually is the father of one of my friends from Macalester who just finished up a Watson studying refugee camps all around the world this year. His approval of his daughter wandering the globe, the fact that he'd "gotten caught up" in Istanbul for the last three months, his presence of mind and easy friendships all made me feel better about the way that I've been living my life as yet.

Danielle, the Aussie doctor, told me that it took her far too long to realize that there are so many different ways that people exist in life that it's impossible to say that any of them are wrong. It doesn't sound very profound, but for those of us in our early twenties who are soon expected to act our age, and know what to do, how to pay our taxes, how to separate lights from darks, to save for retirement and pay off loans...this idea that short of prostitution and heroine addiction, it isn't all that necessary to stay within the nine-to-five lines--this idea is seductive.

I saw Irmak and Duyguu in Izmir...Lovely lovelies. We lazed around and watched the sun set over the sea. It was amazing to see all of the places they'd been talking about for such a long time, and to ask people what they thought about the military and the coup and the president handing out doorless refrigerators promising them doors upon his election. Irmak, me, Bardhi, Bardhi's Mormon friend from Utah--it is incredible that we come from such radically different places and still manage to see eye-to-eye. Irmak took me to see the ruins that they had uncovered while digging the city's metro. A security guard there, armed with his trusty stick to chase off the teenagers huffing gasoline, escorted us around and explained the underground housing system they had going on there. The entrance was a few boards placed precariously across a ditch behind a car wash, but it worthy of being a tourist attraction.

MORE COMING SOON

2007-07-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

As a note, I wrote that last entry quite awhile ago.

Right now Im in Geneva, writing on a really irritating french keyboard. Pardon my ango centrism, I dont have the punctuation to be politicallz correct. Anyway, the program is absolutely amazing...as much as I have been trying to avoid supurlative language like "amazing" and "fantastic" (the positive thinking hippy girl syndrome), sometimes it cant be helped. Im at a summer school conducted by the Quaker United Nations Office, which works with human rights, refugees, peace and disarmament, and global economic issues. It kind of runs the gamet...but the idea is that we meet people from all of those different sectors, hear about the main issues and what it is exactlz what they do. Mainly, it has been helping me to realize that the UN is made up of well intentioned and imperfect human beings with limited budgets and political constraints. Considering it si kind of like a giant non profit thats been around for less than sixtz years, its modest and imperfect accomplishes are, at times, worthz of some kind of applause. All of my fancy pants liberal arts education stuff has sort of treated the UN as this amorphous bureacratic tangle representing all of the hegemonic evil in the world. And to some extent thats true. Yes, a lot of it works on personal connections--very few institutions in this world dont work that waz. Am I turning to the dark side?

The greater thing thats happened here is that Im with Quakers, and recieving a lot of the same kinds of renewing and affirming vibes from the rest of the group. The UK and Netherlands Quakers here have the same kind of open minded sense of humor that was so familiar back in the States. There are two particularly amazing girls from Bosnia and Serbia who have been working in peace organiyations for a few zears. Thez have truly unique senses of humor, seem to have a really good grip on what does and does not matter to them when everything is said and done. I was intimidated att first bu tnow it loks like I might end up visiting

2007-06-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm curled up on a fold-out couch in Paris. I am somehow avoiding the tourist traps that travelling seems to offer. Seeing Patricia again in this city; figuring out ways to feel satisfied in contexts other than thte broken record-playing community of Mac is making me optimistic about going back there and beyond. I can't remember if I wrote about this before, but I landed the job of running the Macalester bicycle cooperative next year. I'd like to think that my lack of mechanics skills is a testament to my ability to charm the pants off of biker dudes via phone interviews, but I think it is more indicative of the lack of applicants. Nevertheless, I think I'm in for something new. At the very least, I'll have perma-grease all over me for a good long while..

This past week I spent traveling by myself through the south of Spain to Portugal. It's been great, and I haven't spent any time alone at all. In Granada I met a group of guys from Tazmania, two of whom were cycling the entire way around the Mediterranean. They started in Libya, went through Egypt and Lebanon and Syria and Turkey, Macedonia, the whole shbang. Their point, it seemed, was to prove that the barrier between there and here is only a mental one; and we're the ones that are missing out. It was a little strange--two of them were financial planners who hated their jobs most of the time. I was sitting there thinking "now these are people who live life to the fullest" - and who is to say otherwise, I guess...but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

...what? Did that make any sense? I've become pretty fond of people who throw out completely irrelevant proverbs at awkward moments in conversation; obliging everyone else to nod in a "youv'e got that right" kind of way.

Somehow the feeling of the hostel in Lisbon really stirred me up and made me enthused about meeting people once again. Beforehand I'd grown kind of tired of having the same kinds of trite interactions with travelers at other hostels...where are you going...where have you been...gosh how do those women wear heels on the cobblestone...oh really? i like pink floyd, too....but in Lisbon, the hostel was fantastic and Australians had taken over like a plague of frogs. I think the water in the toilets started to flush the opposite direction.

The trip to Barcelona was everything that a trip to Barcelona might promise. Jesus that was a whole month ago. What have I been doing with myself? We watched a flamenco show and went dancing with a Polish guy who has some mysterious desk job with the European Commission, as well as three very jolly French physical therapists. Irmak and I got along swell; somehow we manage not to offend eachother even as roommates--snooze alarms, odorific tennis shoes, phone conversations with pets, and all. When I'm with her people often think she's American, which is somewhat unfortunate, I guess...we heard a tale about George Bush's "weather machine" that he'd used to sic the hurricane on New Orleans. Park Guell, a Park designed by Gaudi overlooking the city that consistst of winding paths through a forest dotted with enormous accompishments of architecture and mosaics and quirky people...it's so great that there are people out there who see so many possibilities in such detail....I gained a lobster-worthy coloring on only one side of my body after I fell asleep on the public beach. We were conned into buying tickets to a show--we saw Deep Dish at Pacha--apparently the best DJ in the world at the best club in the world, and I have to admit that both lived up to their reputations.

2007-05-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

I go through some sort of a mild panic attack about how I am not accomplishing anything for about three or four 30 second intervals every day, usually while I am in lecture. They pass quickly, and I am distracted by picking lint off of my jacket, drawing daisies on my notebook, or tapping my feet to the rhythm of "another one bites the dust." However, the frustration I draw from being frustrated with myself is pretty fruitless. I am always wanting to improve myself in the same ways, with the same methods, which never work, and every time I beat myself up over it. Perhaps it is time for this project of constant improvement to grind to a screeching halt. I’m done! I’m good enough! I will neglect to read or recognize the names in the East Asia section of BBC until the end of time! I will never take the recycling out until it starts to smell bad!

I've had a series of conversations lately with Paola and Luigi and Jessica about this elephant in the room otherwise known as graduation. Here in Maastricht I've been in a very strange space because I feel like I am doing absolutely nothing to make the world a better place--everything I do feels completely self interested. Whatever convictions I had developed in India seem to have disappeared. I've bought my fair share of clothing most likely made in sweatshops, I take full ten-minute showers, I even found myself throwing away an aluminum can the other day. Whenever I say things like that out loud, I am confronted with plenty of perfectly sufficient rationalizations for this kind of behavior--we college students are "preparing to do good for the world," or "you deserve this break, you work hard the rest of the year," or "I would do something, but there's just so little time!" Pick one, order a beer, and relax unmolested by conscience. I'm just being cynical, I'm not nearly as upset about things as this would suggest.

I really do convince myself that I'm happiest when I'm running through the countryside--I'm fortunate enough to have a park composed of woods and sheep pastures on top of ahill overooking the whole valley. About a month or so ago, I bumped into a group of maybe forty or fifty runners. I joined them, and soon realized that it was more or less a senior citizens' group--but they tend to be pretty hardcore--we run maybe eight or nine miles every time we go out. They all make fun of me in Dutch, but I go along because they know the way around the most incredible countryside. We were running along one gorgeous stretch of woods next to the river, when all of a sudden the forest fell away into a barren field of fallen trees and overturned earth. One guy in red spandex shouted "Hey guys, this is the golf course I'm building, isn't is fantastic?" and proceeded to take us on a running tour of his new development. He even showed us the "eco-zone" the Dutch government required him to make--a pathetic little outcropping of scrawny saplings held erect by chicken wire. "You know, we want all the badgers and things to have something to nibble!" I think I was expected to coo in appreciation, but it was all I could do to keep from spitting on him like I would the spawn of Satan. Oh well.

Speaking of the spawn of Satan, I've became acquainted with a bunch of air force guys who are stationed at a NATO base across the border in Germany. They apparently come out here to party hardy and promote the already excellent repuation Americans have abroad. However, they're genuinely nice guys, it seems. For some reason they wouldn't believe me that I'm not Dutch--apparently not having a Southern roll to my speech qualifies as a Dutch accent? In any case, I have to admit I was flattered. I like the way Dutch people sound. Ironically enough, van Sant actually means "from sand"--which is a complete coincidence with respect to my nickname. The other people we met that night when we were out dancing was a big group of Mexican law students. I can actually understand their Spanish and they can tolerate my grammatical imperfections--perhaps they even think it's charming. (Yeah right).

2007-05-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the homepage for this thing is now in Dutch. The novelty of the language has not worn off for me; when I hear people speak loudly on the bus I have to suppress the instinct to say "bless you." The supermarket always proves to be an interesting endeavor; everyone here has had the experience of attempting to buy milk and coming home with a carton of "vla," or pourable pudding that comes by the quart. Any theories about why Americans are fat are disproven by that and the swimming pools of mayonnaise the french fries are served in.

I've been a little bit frustrated lately (and well before) with my inability to follow things through and polish things off, check 'em off the list, hit the nail on the head, hit the bullseye, shoot fish in barrels. I can't ever finish what I start. Somehow I manage to convince myself that here I don't have enough time to do everything; but we all know that is a huge lie. If I feel the slightest ambivalence towards something, I selectively forget it; rendering me a very passive aggressive person via e-mail. And unfortunately my cyber-obligations are a little heavier from across the Atlantic. But anyway, I was just thinking that it would be nice to lie on my deathbed and have a nice, neat list of accomplished tasks or songs or a finished book or a couple of nobels hidden under the mattress. Being spread too thin is the downside of eternal enthusiasm. Actually, lately I'd even been somewhat anti-social and irritable--and then I was diagnosed with Shingles, about 60 years ahead of schedule. It's pretty arcane, like having typhoid or scabies or something.

Last weekend we rented a car and went "hiking" in Luxembourg. The trip turned out to be a lot of very random driving and bizarre stops--I managed to have a cultural faux-pas at nearly every gas station...ran into a bunch of British guys who were tracing the Band of Brothers with their young sons, and were continuing the noble cause by helping damsels in distress figure out how to use the pay-by-credit card mechanism. We ended up camping in...a public park of sorts, probably illegally, but had stroop-waffle s'mores with plenty of spaced-out philosophical rambling by the campfire. Waking up in the woods, I realized how much I actually love nature; that the magic of it isn't all attributed to the spiritual nature of camp; I am genuinely inclined to the bush. Sort of. The Luxemburger public park bush, at least. The next day we decided to take the scenic route back to the car, and quickly found ourselves very far from the middle of nowhere and even farther from the rental car. We decided to follow our guts and ended up bushwhacking through private property for quite awhile; hopped over a good number of barbed wire fences to finally traipse through the park with our huge backpacks as old men roller-bladed by.

2007-04-25T19:35:00.000-07:00

To continue:

Waking up in Salzburg in the springtime was something spectacular; the Alps and the castles and the historical knicknacks about Mozart were the icing on the cake of a city that seemed to be held together by tulips and fountains. After considerable disagreement, we split off into two factions, one moving on to Vienna, leaving Tom and Jessica and I to happily depart on our Sound of Music tour in the company of people mainly over the age of sixty. It was fantastic; complete with the gazebo and cheesy music and photo-ops. Our eventual arrival in Vienna went pretty smoothly, and we had an even better night out at restaurants where there seemed to be a disproportionate number of people dressed as the easter bunny. That night I ended up sleeping in the car, and nearly beating the living shit out of Tom in the back of our cramped little Golf, all in an unconcious state. We had a nice easter breakfast of cold boiled eggs and chocolate outside of the cathedral, and rented public bikes to ride around the city. I added Vienna to my list of ferris wheels, and then ended up arguing about what to do next. I think by that point we were all more or less driving one another insane and healed old wounds with the help of ice cream on the way through Bavaria to Nuremburg, and ended up eventually in Cologne. The cathedral there was absolutely incredible--I could show pictures but it would look exactly like every other cathedral you've ever seen--the only difference is that this one is about three times as large.

I guess the month before that was mainly characterized by a religious routine of eating Stefano's pasta for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, going to the Shamrock, and then dancing clumsily at Metamorphosis, and then defending American culture over even more pasta at 5 AM. Occasionally I would be fortunate enough to be sung to sleep. It was really great to have such a constant companion--it felt like we were the fox and the hound, or perhaps a couple of senior citizens who met over prune juice at the Home. There were three consecutive good-bye parties leading up to his departure, culminating in a big to-do up on top of Mount St. Pieter.

2007-04-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

I haven't written in this thing in so long, because it feels overwhelming to think about how much has happened, and how little life has changed. However, that really isn't a bad thing when life is so good here...recently the weather has turned absolutely spectacular and Maastricht is full of couples making out by tulip beds in the park. We all seem to have taken up picnics like some take up drinking; and as the days get longer I find myself utterly incapacitated. Today we had a pie picnic to celebrate Jessica's birthday near the birdcage in Maastricht's public petting zoo, which is every bit as bizarrely saccharine as it sounds. Sometimes people have the wherewithal to order pizza to addresses nearby and go sprinting off after the delivery boy on his scooter when he arrives. At night it is finally warm enough for women to wear what we wear 'round these parts, and we go strolling off to the jazz club or to the pub where the owner gets to know you and brings you a drink that he thinks matches with your personality. The other night our stroll with the Norwegians led us to plop down on the pier in the middle of the Maas. I was the first of the rare species of liberal Americans a few of them had ever encountered. I basked in the attention, and in between my giggles a few phrases that vaguely sounded like "Obama" and "gun control" escaped my throat.

Tonight Jacopo returned from Italy, and he was greeted by about ten of us hiding in his toilet-papered room, complete with the ol' cups of water behind the door trick and plenty of shaving cream in the face. He loved it, I'm sure.

Almost every day I go running through the countryside, sometimes up on Mount St. Pieter and sometimes down by the canal with all of the house boats, sometimes getting lost in the maze of warehouses to the North. At times I convince myself that I couldn't possibly be more content than when I'm plodding through those forests, no matter how much my achilles tendons may disagree. Last week Emily came to visit, and after exploring a new chateau, we marvelled at the light peeking through the leaves for the first time in a long while and then finally ended up in a prone position in a meadow for a good two hours. She's right: friendships are best when you can enjoy the same things, and thus in the springtime no one is a stranger.

During our easter break, we made an attempt to drive to Prague. However, a number of ridiculous logistical hold-ups set us on our way with no destination and no map, until we decided to go to Vienna instead. I had a grand old time--we had quite the motley crew on our trip. Mark from Louisiana convinced me and my darling Turkish roommate to do (politically incorrect) Chinese firedrills when we hit traffic on the Autobahn. I don't know how I manage to assemble these spectacular casts of characters--I think we rivalled Gilligan's Island or the A-Team. After a few confused yet sunny hours wandering Munich and managing to miss all of the can't-miss attractions, we finally ended up in Salzburg, which was even more confusing to navigate until we figured out that the navigator was looking at a map of Strassbourg. Our search for a hostel until four in the morning brought most of us nearly to tears. Mine, personally, were dried by the grumpy little old man who answered the hostel door in a speedo-like little number and reluctantly surrendered the key.

Too tired, going to bed, perhaps to be continued later. Not that anyone cares, or anything--it feels prety presumptuous to think that anyone would be interested enough in my non-escapades to pick through the prose.

2007-03-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

Good Lord. Thomas Friedman actually said something that I agree with. He says, or rather, quotes, that in America, "The only real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement." I think that most American youth grow up with some sort of vague notion that there is some degree of poverty, somewhere, and it appears in the form of starving children that show up on TV every once in awhile. Anxiety this might incite can be quelled by donating ten-year-old canned yams from the back of your cabinet every Thanksgiving and donating the penny you get back from your 99-cent burger to the Ronald McDonald House for Children. This is, of course, an overstatement--it really discredits the countless ranks of benevolent Americans that Do Things--but bear with me, because I am allowed to be as sensationalist as I want in my dinky little online journal. What I found, coming back from India, is that we in the developed world have a very subtle subconscious notion that for some reason we deserve what we have. If tomorrow I were to wake up in the shoes of a shoe-less woman selling wormy apples on the streets of Jaipur, and this shoe-less woman were to wake up in my Sketchers, the situation would somehow be percieved as unfair. If all human beings are equal, there is absolutely nothing unfair about it: it's her turn. Gloom-and-doom economic forecasts for the United States are regarded with the seriousness of the apocalypse, whereas newspaper headlines of famine in Africa quickly find themselves in the recycling bin to be made into new newspapers declaring the next famine in Asia. Why am I even writing this? I'm just saying what every hippy has heard and repeated before from their own respective seats from the fourth floors of a libraries in the Netherlands. Someone give me a bullhorn, if the Western window is open maybe they can hear me in Brussels. I need to stop muttering arrogant cynical incantations and start articulating constructive thoughts in complete sentences to people who care. Maybe that advice should be manufactured into a bumper sticker to be sold at Record and Tape Traders. Or better yet, a tattoo. I'm already off to a good, constructive start. Good idea #2 is in the works; I think it will have something to do with how to surgically implant my foot into my mouth.

2007-02-26T15:01:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to escape the dreariness of the dormitory and the awful weather, Stefano, Joe and I decided to drive to London. It was great; I was proud of the precision with which we scanned and compared insurance documents and statistics about kilometers per meter. We first stopped in Antwerp--basically we just drove from one city to the next, looking for the city center and marvelling at every single beautiful thing that every town has to offer. Usually we were making fun of Catholocism. Gent had a castle with enough passages and fun stuff to climb on to bring out the scrappy eight year old in me. In one restaurant we started talking with a woman half sipping her coffee and half tending to her fat little dogs...she and her husband spend eight months of the year running a restaurant in Greece, and the rest of the time they pack their beagles into the car and visit friends all over Europe. The fat owner bumbled over and sliced us off big fat pieces of fatty chocolate cake made by his fat wife.

After wandering around on the jetties on the beach just before a storm, we coasted in to the Calais ferry crossing. Sadly enough, the ferry was 200 euro, not 19 like we thought. So we drove to Bolougne and slept on the beach under the stars, and climbed the cliffs the next morning. The rest of the time we drove from town to town in Belgium trying not to spend money. The equally poor Joseph filled himself with chocolate and beer, while Stefano and I were surviving on a diet of peanut-butter & mustard rice cakes. At night they scared me silly with stories about Belgian axe-murderers, cannibals, and freak truck drivers. As awkward and uncomfortable as that puny car was, we managed to sleep in until eleven on a random side street in a town we didn't know the name of. We had a picnic by the river in Namur, but our blankets and bottles of unidentified brown liquid (tea) led passers-by to think that we were runaway teens. It wasn't the first time someone has made that mistake about me, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The weather was unbelievably awful and matched the somber mood that ought to accompany a visit to Waterloo, I guess. The countryside was really gorgeous. At one point we thought we would drive to Luxembourg just for the novelty, but that was a stupid idea, and rumor has it that Luxembourg is a stupid country anyway. This morning I woke up late for the time we had to return the rental car, so I went in my pajamas. The study-abroad coordinator rode by on his bicycle as I emerged from a mechanic's garage in an old-lady night gown and a track jacket with a sleepy Italian on my arm. I may have managed to salvage a reputation after the Belgian male-roommate snafu, but now I'm sure Jorg thinks I'm completely insane.

I guess I was just more glad about spending time with such great people. It's wonderful to hang out with people who have all of their identity issues taken care of. It's all a done deal. No insecurities, no flip-flopping around, no excluding people, no nothing. It might have something to do with the language barrier, but Stefano is invariably happy-go-lucky, and if he ever judges people, he certainly doesn't make it apparent. Really, he inspires me to keep my door open and force people to eat my habitually disgusting bulgur wheat concoctions. And Joe is completely comfortable with himself and his quirks and unique habits. Stefano and I cursed his name for about forty minutes while we waited for him in driving wind on the top of one of the cliffs by the sea while he wandered around collecting shells in the tide pools below. Maintaining an adecquate sense of wonder is not to be underestimated.

I lent out my extra mattress to a Spanish girl this week, and I just found it in the room of an Estonian basketball champion. I also just met a guy who is the eighth fastest rubics-cube solver in the world. Walking superlatives are everywhere.

And, Serbia is cleared of genocide? What?

As I screw around in the Netherlands, life goes on.

2007-02-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

Today we woke up late, ate from a giant block of parmesan cheese, wandered in the sunshine in cowboy hats, and made good use of a moon bounce in the back of a restaurant populated by senior citizens.

2007-02-18T10:02:00.000-08:00

Carnaval is one of the most magnificent displays of humanity I've ever seen. It is sort of the equivalent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but much, much better--everyone (and that means quite literally everyone from the cradle to the grave) dresses up from head to toe in costumes or neon colors or garbage bags and there is an enormous party on the streets of Maastricht for three days straight. I really love that demographics aren't held so sepearately here-- there are drunks wandering the streets from noon to night but they don't act so awful that people are afraid to bring their children along. I myself have been wearing an Austrian yodelling dress for about 36 hours straight. The apron has proven far more functional than it was intended to be and I have all sorts of festive foods on display on my front. I spent some time wandering around with Norwegians in plastic horns who stabbed strangers indiscriminately with plastic swords.

My lack of a roommate has actually made me far less lonely--it's kind of my own space where I can serve pots of lentils, play Ace of Base, and wear cowboy hats at four in the morning. All of our little dinner-parties have helped me discover not only that I can, in fact, cook--I actually like to; and now I'm dreaming of starting some sort of organic bed-and-breakfast someday. It's been kind of a hotel. Olivier took refuge from his horrifyingly patriotic American roommate for a little while, Kata the German debutante blessed me with her presence for a few days and then sweet sweet Patricia came from Paris. It's really wonderful; sometimes the Europeans flatter me by saying I don't look or act American like the 90 or so of my compatriots running around the dorm because I've made an effort to get to know them. But it's just human nature, even They tend to hang out in nationalistically homogenous cliques. It's pretty easy to meet new people because everyone wants to practice their English with a native speaker. I've been hanging out with a hoard of Italians that meet every stereotype known to man. They are extremely welcoming, always, always invite dozens of people to eat pasta, never make it out the door before midnight because they're waiting for someone to decide which shoes to wear, and always stop to talk to you on the sidewalk. It's kind of funny how much of a difference little cultural differences like that make--in the US it is acceptable to just smile and wave (or even ignore your friends) about 90% of the time. It seems like the Italians go to great lengths to make everyone feel appreciated and to ensure that no one feels like they were the last one picked for the football match. It's a great quality that I've tried to pick up--sometimes a little awkwardly--but for the most part it makes this place feel a lot more like home.

Classes are pretty intense, with plenty of frustrating group work to suck the hours out of the day. It's a little funny because my life here consists of school, going running around harbors full of house boats, cooking, and dancing til the cows come home. It's a happy routine I'm starting to find monotonous, but I think anything can seem monotonous when the weather is so gray. Jessica and I made an effort to seek out the campus Amnesty International, but it seems like all of the activist groups just have one meeting a month for 'discussion' at the nearest pub. It's really easy to let weeks roll by without any sort of thoughtful reflection. When I think about it I really miss everyone from home. I'm starting to crave my genuine friendships in the face of so much general pandemonium.

On a related note, the time has come to decide whether or not to answer the eternal siren-song of camp this summer. If I don't, I'd get to travel around, attend a summer institute at the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva, and maaayyybe see a friend or two in the Balkans. If I do, I get to bask in the glow one of the only communities and places that feels consistent in my life before the dramatic exit from liberal arts la-la land into the great and probably not-so-exciting unknown of (un?)employment.

2007-02-09T03:07:00.000-08:00

People are starting to write proposals for honors theses and fellowships for after graduation and applying for scholarships for masters' degrees. Shit. For some of us, walking the stage is like walking the plank. Others continue to float along on waves of fellowships and programs and internships that convince twenty-somethings that they are important, always "preparing" to do something for the world. In India Khemraj resented all of the coferences to which he was invited to speak, because he was always asked to talk to academics and others who talk about development like it's football. It would be easy enough to keep pursuing things like that--it seems like a lot of people manage to talk the talk until the day they die. For some reason I feel like I will have to actually do something after I graduate in order to justify all of the 'preparation' I have had thus far, but I guess what I should really be preparing myself for is the possibility that I could soon be joining the ranks of philosophically frustrated youth preparing mocha lattes in San Francisco. I think they coud form an army powerful enough to dismantle...something, if they could only figure out what it is.

2007-02-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

I had a lot of really interesting conversations with Professor Samatar, who is absolutely notorious for being rigorously academic, strict, and set in his opinions. I actually had the gumption to mention my doubts about higher education to him at a casual dinner, and he has been surprisingly enough very respectful of my hippy-dippy remarks since then. He is the kind of man who wears a suit to school because it commands respect, and it conveys respect for his students. He really believes in people demonstrating that they are serious about things--in general, things and people and endeavors should be taken very seriously, papers should be handed in with the proper format, etc. He resents sloppiness. He has somehow realized (I guess it isn't exactly a secret) that I fall somewhat on the other side of the debate. He showed me a passage in a book he was reading about the ways of the Samurai, saying that the samurai always has his hair combed, a disposition of perfect grace, always composed and clean, because he never knows when his death is coming and he wants to die with honor. It's a good point--you always want to make a good impression. I agree with him in a way--I do think that dressing neatly shows respect for a situation/audience, that being thorough and careful with your reports conveys motivation, that perfect diction is what is needed to articulate a point. My response to him, though, was that the problem with this mindset is that it will automatically discount a lot of very valid knowledge. I think it is awfully arrogant and immature to disregard someone's perspective because he had a ketchup stain on his tie, the report wasn't stapled, the speaker didn't have a good grip on parallel structure, or she did not knows English good.

I guess this kind of reflects something that I've been trying to work on in general this year...really interacting with the part of the person that matters. If I stop listening to someone because they have an irking nasal quality to their voice, because they are wearing a Nike t-shirt, because they like George Bush, I'm the one who is missing out. It isn't always the intuitive thing to do, but life seems to be a lot more worthwhile when you really listen to what people are trying to say, or at least try to understand what they are about. It reminds me of the attitude of those truly brilliant music aficionados who recognize great songs when they hear them; whether they are modern country or old jazz singers or Indian drummers. I love people who can have that attitude--it would never even occur to me to enjoy certain things in life until someone I respect gestures towards them, like wine or cheese or Woody Guthrie or the way that tea bags spin when you lift them out of your cup.

2007-02-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

I finally am connected to the internet and it's a little strange! I guess I haven't really had that since about May or so...I've gotten used to not having a cell phone or the internet or a watch. It has helped me to keep my head in the present moment instead of always worrying about where I have to be next and what still have to do and who is waiting for me to call on the other side of the world. Now that I have it, though, I'm realizing just how much I miss everyone and how easy it is for friendships to slip through my fingers like sand through a sieve. It's an erie feeling; it's making me realize how easily people come and go, or how easily I slip in and out of their lives and make new friends and then turn around and forget them a few fleeting weeks later. What does any of that mean in the first place? I'd really like to be better about it in all. I've barely gotten to talk about India with anyone, and it really feels like a dream.

2007-02-03T19:19:00.000-08:00

I see that blogger lists "scooters" as a suggestion for a subject for this post--I really wish I could have a life that leads me to put scooters as the subject of my posts. Sadly enough, that is far from the case. I just got a bike, however, which is apparently going to rocket me into productivity instead of taking a whole forty minutes out of my day to and from school--to tell the truth though, I love it..I've been running around the lake and the forts and old limestone caves near the river..there is even a petting zoo in the middle of town with all sorts of unprecedented mammals. I just went out with the Erasmus student organization to a "Cantus," an old Dutch tradition that involves singing the Spice Girls and holding wooden shoes in your hands. Women's issues manage to socially paralyze me at certain moments, but really this place is great. The Belgians and Italians and Spaniards all had a big potluck the other night with paella and polenta and p-waffles. I ended up talking with someone who knew about the Indian origin of Sufism and to a Nigerian about what he actually thinks about Shell. There are impressive people to meet everywhere I look. I feel like a kid in a candy store. I actually used that phrase when I was talking to one of the Belgians and now he repeats it to everyone else who is learning English as one of the best English idiomes of all time.

Last weekend I went to visit Emily in Berlin, which was pretty great. It is reputably one of the hippest cities around, but it was so freezing cold that i think the cool cats were freezing their asses off. Somehow I managed to hurt my foot so that it was swollen up and a little purple on Saturday monring; and one of the pre-med students who was staying in my dorm at the hostel told me I needed an x-ray. Unfortunately I didn't really see museums, but instead opted to ride around on the impressively scenic and efficient lite-rail system to see the city. It's a really great display of humanity. I sat next to a couple of girls dressed all in black with black jackets and black sunglasses with a ridiculous sheep dog on the tram. A guy with a guitar waltzed into our car, and the dog started howling along with him when he hit the high notes. Also made it to the German state fair, which, (surprise surprise) included a lot of wurst, beer, cheese, and renewable energy.

I am also impressed when I see windmills on the countryside. However, all of the shops keep their doors wide open and the heat on full blast. No one seem to have any qualms about energy costs there. I do tend to answer for George Bush's energy policies all the time, as though I had been the one that told him to hock a big fat loogie on the Kyoto Protocol. I really like it when people are curious about my views and actually ask me about them and find that I actually am not the American that they imagine--and I really hate it when they ignore me anyway and confront me with statistics about September 11th or quotes about how Bush thought that Nigeria was in Africa. Occasionally I get to impress them by knowing where Oslo is, but when people are really mean I find myself muttering "no, actually, I don't think I can name a single president of Slovakia." I am ashamed of my ignorance, but I think I take it a little too hard because it is impossible for me to reciprocate every nation's knowledge about the US.

2007-01-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

I'm in the University of Maastricht library at a long stretch of desks next to an aisle nicknamed "The Runway." Most what would normally be walls are glass, and thus everyone dresses their best to be seen by all, heels clicking away on the tile as you take your oh-so-important research to the copy machine. The security system here rivals that of American airports, complete with a computerized locker system and an absolutely absurd system of hooks and pulleys to bear-bag your jacket. There is an equally impressive machine that sorts plastic and glass bottles for when you finish your Evian water, and a Capuccino machine straight out of Star Wars to blast your nervous system into productivity.

Outside, though, the streets are sturdy cobblestone and there are relics from the Roman empire to the medieval past sprinkled all through the town. There are riverboat cafes, and best of all, impeccable bike lanes that are even included on the traffic circles. I walk everywhere and on good days people even flatter me by thinking I'm a native. The town is usually full of students, but in a good way. There are 'more bars than days of the year,' for better or for worse, but thus far everyone seems to be far more sophisticated about it than in the States. I've been spending most of my nights with my wonderful Turkish roommate, Duygu, and all of her equally adorable Turkish friends. A few weeks ago we went ice skating and managed to sustain a limited number of non-life-threatening injuries. La vida es buena.

Duygu usually sleeps all day in our IKEA-furnished dorm room while I spend my days nine to five in a seminar with the infamous Professor Samatar. Even though I went into the program with plently of philosophical issues and even some resentment for higher education, I got a lot of out of it and I am really glad that I came. Samatar and I come from such completely different mind-sets that I learned a lot from him, and I still have plenty to chew on. More on that later.

I completely left out the beginning of this fairy-princess existence! I went to Venice to spend New Year's with Amanda at her uncle's apartment. Even though I was a little overwhelmed by certain displays of extravagance, it was at least not over-consumptive. We ate fantastic food and took our time getting dressed up and visited a cute old lady with salsa music and persimmons in her front yard to share. Amanda's Italian cousin, her boyfriend, and a guy named Alessio came for the night, and I fell completely in love with them. We squeezed our way into San Marco square to watch the fireworks, felt the sprinkles of champaigne coming from popping bottles, and pranced around the Rialto with sparklers. There is nothing like a few days with Amanda to remind you how great it is to be alive.

2006-12-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

My mom has a small scratch under her eye from some mysterious "argument with the leaf blower." My brother the crew champion has returned home from college with arms like tree trunks, and my Dad as always has the same goofy smile on his face. It is good to be home. Riding in the car is a completely different experience here--it's a small sound-proof bubble in which drivers can enjoy their Elton John uninterrupted by incessant honking and cows in the road. Driving up my street I felt not unlike the Hippy Princess returning to her royal estate, complete with hot water, clean bed sheets, new laminate flooring, and a refridgerator full of chicken salad to be devoured. I had sort of promised myself I wouldn't start making any vapid comparisons between there and here, but when I ran into my roommate at the Chicago airport and she started saying how rough her $13.50/hr job was, I was thinking about how Shyamji got nineteen cents per fourteen-hour day in the fields. I guess the whole endeavor of weighing how absurd the disparites between what I saw yesterday and what I see today doesn't require much intellectual prowess--it's fairly simple, and I'd start to sound like a broken record if I expressed every comparison that passes through my mind. But I guess all I mean is that the priveleges I've grown up with are far more than all of my previous guilt had addded up to.

This time on the way home the airplane did what I always wish it would--we made a full circle around Gibson Island at close range so that I could pinpoint our little house and the pond and the boat. There, and in the airport, I wasn't really outraged or upset, I was more just overtaken by how silly this whole argument about development is. The extra things that we have like yachts and dog toys and massage chairs really don't add up to a better quality of life at all; and even those who supposedly haven't got a care in the world still find things to preoccuppy their minds. What the hell do poeple live for? How much of our existence really devoted to amassing a huge pile of silly shit from Ethan Allen? Yes, there are people who are worse off--everyone desrves to have enough food to eat, a roof over their head, some clothes if they want them...but I do think that our present preoccupation with "the growing disparity between rich and poor" is misguided.

After a few pukey days in Jaipur, I hopped a train with Laura and Kristen and an embarassing quantity of luggage to the little island of Diu off the coast of Gujarat. It was a sleepy little beach town that still smelled of Portuguese influence...it was gorgeous. We ate plenty of ice cream and coconuts and rented rickety bikes with no brakes to ride around the island and its banyan trees and ancient sea forts. Travelling around here is a far different experience when you can speak a little bit of Hindi--we had tea with a few really enchanting families. We went swimming on a beach where women were mounting jet skis in sarees. I hadn't realized how shy I'd gotten over the past few months--I am a little reluctant just to show my ankles, let alone wear a bathing suit on the beach. The neighboring states have banned alcohol, so vacationing businessmen and students flock to Diu for a drink and "a peek at the foreign ladies." Even though we were swimming in full on baggy t-shirts and long shorts, it felt like they might as well put in stadium seating on the shore. We exited the situation, though, and caught really incredible sunsets every day we were there.

In Delhi Kristen and I were quickly overtaken by the whirlwind chatter of a couple of other guests at our bottom-of-the-line rooftop guest house. A retired pharmacist from Fiji decided to take it upon himself to show us around--which actually turned out to be really rewarding. After playing with a bunch of sweet little kids outside Jamma Masdir (sort of like the Taj Mahal Jr.) we wound our way through Chandi Chowk to a Sikh temple. The worship they have their is really beautiful, but even more amazing was the twenty-four-hour soup kitchen they run. Thousands of people come in and out and eat dhal cooked in pots that are sometimes six or seven feet in diameter. Sikhism renounces the caste system in favor of the belief that all people (even women!!) are equally holy and wortwhile. Mr. Fiji saw the sparkles in my eyes and made some mystical comment about how he could feel that I would go there again one day, and I would really love to believe him.

In Ahmdebad we visited Gandhi's Ashram by the riverside. His belief held that anything you have that you don't need is actually stolen from the poor--every extra pair of shoes you have is another pair that a shoeless man does not have. Food, likewise, should never be enjoyed as a pleasure, but rather a necessity for the existence of the body. After a too-expensive dinner at a restaruant where all the stools are saddles and all the waiters are dressed as cowboys, I started to feel pretty uneasy about the money I'd spent goin' cahootz. Although the rational side of my brain has all sorts of explanations for why I don't agree wholeheartedly with Ghandi's vows of poverty, I started to feel like the way I'd been acting almost negated anything that I could have pretended to have learned during my time in Amarpura. I guess above all I would like to remember that I am not entitled to anything I have, and to be grateful and intentional about every little thing that I own or consume. My track record thus far is very poor. On the airplane I abstained from a couple of meals after I realized exactly how much plastic was being smashed up and thrown away throughout the process. And even now, I think it will be a little while before I'm back to buying things that come in plastic bottles.

The next day Kristen and I journeyed out to the International Toilet Museum. It was a long metro ride through the vast New Delhi sprawl followed by a long rickshaw ride and a trekk through a construction site blocking the road to the establishment. It was well worth the trip. In addition to a wealth of fascinating trivia, they had a long display of the many different designs of oh-so-practical compost toilets that can be made for cheap virtually anywhere and don't require low-caste women to clean them. They also had designed a machine that both captures the methane gas produced by human waste for cooking fuel and purifies its water to be re-used again. I'm not sure why, but their poop laboratory really sent chills down my spine and had me itching to go on a toilet crusade after I've got my bachelor's squared away.

2006-12-12T23:11:00.000-08:00

Last night jolly old St. Rakshat with the blue-ribbon moustache took us all out for a ridiculous amount of fried food to bid his farewells. Afterwards, a few of us piled into his car to go home, and he ended up speeding up off the mountain to Nahagar fort with his rap music blaring. He knew some particularly exciting way of sneaking in, so we all sat and talked staring out over the Jaipur city lights and listening to the brass band music drifting up from the weddings below. We wandered into a step well of maybe a hundred feet and stared up at the stars. This place is wonderful.

The last few weeks of my internship were spent largely preparing for the public hearing we were hosting on the fifth about the Bheeladi land issues we had been working on. We went on a long jeep tour of several dozen villages telling people about the problem and asking them to come…sadly enough the car was mostly men, and in nearly every place they would call a meeting, the men would gather round, and their wives would squat about forty feet behind them. Occasionally a woman would raise her voice, but invariably she would either be ignored or hushed by her husband. The jeep tour was a lot of fun; I managed to injure myself swinging on a Banyan tree and for some reason my companions were all extremely concerned with whether or not I was entertained. The jeep itself was exciting; somehow the driver was managing without first gear or brakes.

On one of our long hikes through the mountains at sunrise, I ended up on the brunt end of a bet that I couldn’t carry Kapil on my back. Punkaj was confident that I could hold the both of them and hopped on for the ride. I fell and split open my knee; rinsed it off in the temple well nearby…thus began a long process of pretending like I wasn’t hurt so that I wouldn’t have to see the inside of the government hospital again. To say that medical care here is frustrating is an understatement; even if you can manage to find a doctor who actually has a medical degree, it is even more work to get him to pay attention to you, let alone make the correct diagnosis and treatment. The chances of finding the right medicine at the corner pharmacy are often slim, and in the process the pharmacist will probably persuade you to buy the “non-name brand substitute” and take a hefty percentage tip off the top when he charges you. We educate women and children about health issues, but it feels so useless when they face so few choices.

There is a notorious contingent of “Bengali doctors” in the area. Apparently, in China in the 1970s there was a scheme made in which certain local people were given very rudimentary medical training and dispersed among villages throughout the country. Somehow some of these people slipped over the border into India along with the concept that anyone is capable of fixing someone else as long as they’ve seen someone else do it before. Throughout the area there are doctors who have about four different medicines to address any problem; all in the form of drip bottles. Villagers have a notion that they aren’t going to get better without getting an IV; and the glucose pumped into their systems always makes them feel nice. Thus people go into debt paying ridiculous prices to be pumped full of sugar instead of actually being treated.

Anyway. I guess my last week was mostly governed by the dramatic social life I’d acquired around the village. Palkah had moved back in to get away from her idiot husband, and was so starved for companionship that she always insisted that I not go on field visits so that I could putter around with her. I became the walking equivalent of a Chia pet; she did me up in pretty flowered tattoos up my arms, put oil in my hair, dyed it with Mehndi, and convinced me to pierce my nose. The day before the public hearing I looked not unlike a muppet. I became pretty well-versed in asking all for the gory details of nose piercings in Hindi. The recommended remedies ranged from butter and tumeric powder to kerosene and cow dung. Eventually in Jaipur I had a decent jeweler perform the equivalent of triple by-pass on my nose, but now it’s looking good and I was sure through the process that I never contracted HIV, so one might as well forgive and forget.

The drama with Kapil was never really resolved if there was anything to resolve; kind of culminated into him breaking his hand in a motorcycle accident and then waving his bandaged hand goodbye from a jeep while I marched along in a protest a few days later. I left behind an intricate web of lies that I think will be slowly untangled someday soon. There was something really strange about how chivalrous he always was, but I’m so glad that he’s trying to keep in touch and that I can feel like I have a few dear friends to speak of in this hemisphere. On the last day he was there we climbed a new mountain to watch the sunrise, and I noticed that it actually overlooked the burial ground. It is so tucked away, I first spotted a few mounds clumped together in a field. Then I noticed that the vast expanse of brush that we’d clumped through before was strewn with graves that stretched off into the distance. It seems to be such a different attitude towards death…no tombstones or markers or sacred blessings or any kind of distinction that anything was there at all.

The dharna itself was incredible. Four thousand people came. Twenty five tractors pulling flatbed trailers full of fifty or sixty people each lined up along the dirt road leading to Bheeladi. I eventually surrendered to the army of reporters desperate to talk to the white girl an ended up saying things about Bush in the national press that are worthy of getting me sent to Guantanamo. Aruna Roy came, and several Bheel women actually got up the guts to speak from behind their veils at the microphone. Indian protest songs and chants are so much more passionate and catchy and varied than our own “give peace a chance” spiels. The upper castes staged a counter-protest about three kilometers away in town, but the police were so numerous that there was little opportunity for violence to break out in the first place. Afterwards the flashy guys from the rival non-profit in Bhadesar insisted on giving me a ride home. Khemraj scoffed when I wrinkled my nose at them and shoved me in just to prove some sort of political point. RamRai came along, and the whole time we ended up snickering about their tight jeans and sunglasses instead of actually listening to anything they said. I am pretty judgmental with regards to fancy-pants men. My bathing habits tended to side along with Khemraj and Madhu in the “do-teen din” camp; and coming from an office where most people have no more than three changes of clothes, I can be pretty cynical about anyone who reeks of cologne.

That night everyone was so excited by how well the hearing went that we broke out into a drum-less drum circle that lasted pretty late into the night. Embarrassment about dancing in front of everyone is completely out of the question; I love it. If anything my newfound belief in music has been reinforced—I would love to learn more of those songs that everyone can scream along to…I don’t know, music seems to become something really fantastic as soon as the ego is removed, as soon as it stops being about the performance and more about the experience. Oh God, I’m starting to talk like all of the other hippy dip-shits. I guess it was inevitable.

Saying good-bye in Amarpura was really dramatic with lots of little kids following me around…if someone were to take a picture I’m sure that it could have made some sappy brochure for the Peace Corps. Manoch picked me a flower, but when he held it out to me a little boy named Ankesh grabbed it and smashed it. Manoch was so angry he smacked him on the head, thereby turning the incident into a minor spectacle because I wasn’t enthused about him hitting little kids. And saying good-bye to the office was also rough; I bawled the whole time and they all waited with me on the road to find me a truck to hitch a ride into town…Khemraj kept muttering that Marxists don’t cry, but Karun told me afterwards that he did, too. If I could speak Hindi I would fly back and work for them in a heartbeat…the whole time I was there I was trying to convince myself that maybe I’ll take some classes so that I can go back in a few years. It was strange; for the most part I had been concerned about being a burden to them, but now I can see that they really had never gotten to know women who speak and act as freely as we Western gals. It meant something to them.

The next day I met Jeremy and Laura and Ryne in Udaipur and spent the day wandering around the lakes. The city has a fairy-tale air to it. Laura finally showed us ShikShanter, a non-profit she’d been working with that is devoted to alternative education. The whole place is engaged in stuff like making things out of trash, homeopathic medicine, cow dung soap…there is a large contingent of really intelligent young guys who have dropped out of school. It was nice to have someone scoff at my human rights scholarship while they pounded lemongrass into pulp for tea. One fascinating guy named Ram told us all of the intricate details of urine therapy. It would be very easy to lose yourself in a place like that.

One of the founders, Manish, pulled us aside as we were leaving. He started talking to us about our opinions about development…and how all of us are even more cynical than we were at the start about the entire enterprise. He had a really great way of articulating what it is that feels so awful about it…he said that our way of thinking labels millions and millions of people as failures and worthy of help on the basis of numerical indicators. We see certain people as problems to be solved simply because they don’t fit into the box of what we deem as acceptable. I do believe that almost all of the programs started are well intentioned, but how many of them are in response to shocking statistics? How many are genuinely an effort to solve the problems of friends? So much of it really lacks respect for people’s abilities to understand their situations, to have their own attitudes towards economics and power. It’s true, I’m guilty of the same thing, I see simple lifestyles and think of simple minds. The language barrier makes it really difficult to realize that that isn’t true at all. Some of them are truly blessed to have never heard of Marx because they have a better grip on reality. Manish had grown up in the US, went to Harvard, and worked for years for organizations like USAID, UNESCO, the World Bank as an educational consultant. He’s been everywhere and he’s seen it all and the whole shbang lacks the basic principle that perhaps local people have something to contribute themselves.

Along with that, he picked up an abhorrence for the idea that he could tell other people what and how their children should learn. Or just that in general, billions of us worldwide are listening to someone else who is telling us what is and isn’t relevant to know. In America we spend thousands of dollars just to prove to someone else that we’ve jumped through an educational hoop. A lot of it feels artificial and empty. Like diplomas come in Happy Meals. Ugh it sounds so dramatic. But really, he did drive the point home that our whole lives we’ve been letting someone else tell us what should take priority in our lives, and we haven’t really been taught to recognize the voices inside of ourselves that tell us what we want out of life. Manish was the final straw that broke the camel’s back in convincing Laura to stop going to school, and I’m sure he’s done the same for thousands.

I’m a little worried about next semester because after this internship I’ve lost a lot of my reverence for academic discourse. The whole thing will be about ‘globalization and inequality,’ but to me I think it’s going to feel like pulling conclusions out of thin air, muttering incantations…I’m afraid that it’s going to feel so arrogant. How can any of us really say anything about the state of the world? And who is going to care? Who is going to read our papers anyway? The only real reason that we’ve been given this opportunity is so that Macalester can boast about its brilliant students and climb in the rankings of US News. I’m really looking forward to going to Holland, definitely, am feeling far more grateful than anything else…this conversation shook me up but I can still see flaws in his argument. I guess I’m just going to have to work pretty hard to make the academics feel real to me and to stay honest but not disrespectful during the seminar.

2006-11-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

Now that I can understand at least a little bit of Hindi, I realize what a sheltered world I had been living in in Jaipur. There are so many sweet and friendly English-speaking people who are eager to make blonde girls feel at home...but so many of them treat people from lower castes like only so much flesh and bone. My host family is really harsh to Purnima; and even the esteemed leader of our health non-profit keeps servants around to bring him biscuits and tea.

All of the philosophical issues that come up with development work that had been previously tying me up in knots have lost their importance to me. There is no way that we can ever really escape our moral ties...There will always be some way to argue that anything I do is reprehensible. But you live from moment to moment, and it is clearer what to do when you are faced with one situation and one person at a time. I feel like criticisms of development are important, but sometimes are too harsh for their own good--if we all allowed ourselves to be paralyzed by the desire to do things perfectly, nothing will ever be accomplished. No, it is not sustainable to steal electricity on the behalf of a community. But at least their water pumps will work.

Alllso, the fact that LSS is so bothered by staff conflicts and gossip and bad coffee and lack of documentation and finance problems is almost comforting. In the future when i am bothered by the same things in some hum-drum non-profit in America, I won't have romantic notions that grassroots human rights organizations in the developing world are better.

I am so in love with everyone here. We have a giant bag full of guavas in the office that are free for the taking, and I'm learning how to make roti like a good di-di, and a few of them have mastered "Old MacDonald."

2006-11-25T21:15:00.000-08:00

LSS is incredible. I can't believe I'll have to leave.

I don't even know where to start. I guess maybe since my last post, or something. That might be logical.

So we hopped the bus to Delhi with a bitter old fatso called Gordonji and a farmer from a nearby village called Shulanji. Karun told me all of his stories of times when he's beaten people up defending women's honor, and showed me how to break thumbs, cut off circulation, how to hit someone in the neck so their windpipe closes up. I have no idea whether or not to take him seriously.

We arrived in Delhi in the wee hours of the morning. I flew into Delhi a few months ago, and I guess at the time I was kind of shut off from what was happening around me, or maybe just taken aback by how different everything was. This time, I can see how much the poverty there sucks. There is nothing romantic about it. Waking up in the morning and taking a bath in the sewer is no picnic for anyone and neither is watching white tourists ride by in rickshaws with Marie biscuits in their mouths. We'd heard that "accomodations had been arranged for us," and we eventually found them in the middle of an enormous dusty feild with three tents that were about an acre in area. There were thousands of activists from all over India staying on the ground there with noooo bathroom! It doesn't sound awful, but it sure smells awful.

The actual social forum was similarly dusty, with thousands of representatives of different NGOs all competing for eachother's attention. Groups of villagers performed their respective traditional dances in random places; a union of hundreds of bicycle rickshaw drivers circled the grounds; and swarms of protesting crowds all crunched through two non-functioning metal detectors. A really great band called Log Dixshit (haw haw) performed with a group of Nigerians who had come, and when I went up to the dusty front pit to dance with everyone else I was again subject to the same video camera attention I'd been avoiding in my little village.

We were lucky enough to find Chayya from the office in the crowd, so I ended up in her hotel room that night instead of the circus tent. A couple of the heads of one of the central offices invited us to dinner. One of the older, more respected heads got a little tipsy (off of two beers), was loud and inappropriate, fell into the depressed drunk "I want to die" talk, and then vomited all over himself in the restaurant. What is seen as a regrettable but understandable mistake for US college students is seen as a truly shameful offense for upper-caste Indians like him. I felt terrible for him.

The next day Karun got a call from LSS, saying that almost the entirety of our staff had been attacked and three of them were in the hospital. What had happened had to do with the land dispute we'd been working on in Bheeladi. The upper caste of hte village had called a comunity meeting to settle the dispute once and for all. The LSS staff went and demonstrated that the local government did not have the right to bulldoze Bheel land on four or five legal counts. Within the space of ten minutes, a few dozen women showed up on a tractor weilding sickles from the North, and then about a hundred men with sticks surrounded them from the other direction. They were all fortunate to get out alive witht he help of a few policemen. Everyone was bruised and battered but no one was seriously injured. The upper castes destroyed almost all of the Bheels' crops for the year.

Everyone recounts the details of that day as though it were an action film or a slapstick comedy. RamJahn was chased through a cornfield by a man on a motorcycle. He'd been sick with chickenhunia, so after a few minutes of running he started vomiting and had to give up--but he adds pulsing music and vivid vomiting noises to the tale. Narunia didn't run, she went into the nearest Bheel house, changed into Bheel clothes, and stood outside pretending she had nothing to do with LSS. A crowd of men picked up our frail little Khemraj high above their heads and slammed him on the ground. Ramrai, the guy who's leg I'd been trying to fix for awhile, couldn't run--so he stopped, surrendered, put his head on the ground adn told them that he had a broken leg. They asked where it was broken, he showed them, and they hit the spot with their clubs. I guess it all sounds pretty gruesome when I write it down, but every time we talk about it we all laugh until we cry.

Sooo Madhu, Karun, and I all stayed up all night at the main office in town writing a summary of what had happened as well as a petition to be passed around. The next day we had called a dharna in front of the Collector's office, so we had everyone from the village and the organization sitting under a canopy, blocking the front gate of the governor's office all day long. Prasand Ajit and Palkah were there...everyone's old friends showed up to show their support so the whole thing felt a little bit like a picnic to me. Eventually we made our way intothe inner courtyard of the government office. All of the women walked behind everyon eelse witht heir heads covered. There was a family of stray puppies living under one of the pillars. We waited for about an hour for the collector to pay attention to us. When he finally did, he gave us about two minutes of his time and then brushed us off claiming that it was the duty of the police to take care of the dispute. This government system is so frustrating...the media and the police and the government area lal dominated by the same upper astes who don't care about the same people.

The dispute still isn't resolved. We've been scrambling to find legal reasinging to back up our position, but it's getting harder and harder by the minute. I'm really amazed by the Bheels--at first they hesistated becasue they were so afrid for their safety, but now they're ploughing ahead with the legal battle even though they live in constatn fear of sticks. The summary that we wrote appeared in "The Hindu"--the most liberal of the three major newspapers in India. But even that doesn't seem to be enough.

Yesterday I went with all of them to the police station to file their complaints of what had happened for hte second time. They are all so cheerful, everything is a joke, even for the old farmer men who are trying to defend their land. There is one man who was beat up so badly that he was bleeding badly from two or three places on his head. He didn't have any other clothes, so he wore his blood-stained shirt for more than a week afterwards.

Phew...what else...

Since I've learned more of my broken Hindi my so-called "social life" in Amarpura has picked up considerably. Every morning when I go running a bunch of the kids come to do stretches and calisthenics with me. Manoch also goes running early every morning, but when I join him he goes ten times faster than is necessary. My adopted dog usually comes with us, and one time he tripped me so I had a few small abrasions on my hands and elbows. Within an hour or two all of Amarpura knew about my "accident" and was giggling and asking me about it for the next week. Every time I visit a house, I end up singing one of the old folk songs I know, and they try to teach me a Hindi song and laugh at my accent. The awkward routine has become so normal for me that I almost enjoy it.

I finally went to Manoch's house to drink tea with his family. They're wonderful, his brothers are really charming, and Ashish the photographer is always greeting me with some roasted peanuts and a flower and some of his prints. Manoch is sweet, but everyone in the village has been following our interactions very closely and whenever I flake out on showing up at his house he gets really flustered because everyone thinks I'm refusing a marriage proposal.

Speaking of marriage: I'm thinking maybe I won't.

Yesterday after an awkwardly scrunched car ride, Kapil and I played hid and seek in a guava orchard. The other night we had flower wine and chicken at Prakash's house with Gita. I really love this place.

2006-11-06T23:51:00.000-08:00

Oh man, I'm getting more and more homesick every minute. I'm feeling kind of nautious from the smell of urine, boiling fat, and some tragic mix of easy-listening Hindi jazz coming over the radio. The bus ride was a crowded hour and a half--a woman who was being crushed in the aisle deposited her adorable children on my lap. The smallest, a baby, had a tumor the size of a plum on the back of its head. The health system here is absolutely atrocious. I've been trying to get my frien RamRai the right attention for the gaping wound on his leg but the government hospital seems like nothing but a great place to get an infection. Gloves? what are gloves? We've been visiting the homes of people who have died pretty frequently to pay our respects to one elder or another...My friend Shyamji has the unfortunate tradition in his village that every time a man dies, all of the men who are younger have to shave their heads. So he's never happy with his haircut. He asked me to bring him a wig from the city, but I've pointed him in the direction of baseball caps instead.

Speaking of hats, by some strange twist of fate a strain of neon fabrics have entered the local market, so a lot of the farmers wear hot pink and hot orange turbans out in the fields. I've interviewed a few people who have worked as bonded laborers... Some of them are really grateful to have been released, but others miss the steady income of Rs 6000 ($10/month) and the guarantee of some kind of food, no matter how bad, on their plates. Poverty is not good. I've started thinking that a lot of the pity that we westerners have for those who have less is unwarranted. It's silly to pity someone for not having a floor--it's like pitying someone for not having a corvette or a swimming pool. I guess the only real conclusion I've come to is that even though poverty is awful, the greatest joy that anyone can have is to be happy in spite of their chains. And that applies to everyone in the universe, no matter their income.

Madhu is amazing; I"m so lucky to get to whisper with her every night. She is trying to start a girls' youth group that would inform them about their legal rights as women. She is ashamed of herself for getting married, because it would have been a great way to set an example in saying that you don't need a husband. Marriage is really crippling for women here. It's sad to get to know all of these young, energetic girls and know that soon they'll be married and made ot sit in silence ein the corner making chapati from behind a veil.

It's starting to drive me crazy having people tell me what to eat and how much and where to sleep and what to do and that I can't go into town by myself all the time. A few days ago I drank some bad water, and they insisted that eating would help and shoved a bunch of chilles swimming in oil in my direction. When I said that I'd rather not, they wanted me to have Chaach, a mixture of buttermilk, yogurt, salt, and lemon. Bah! Humbug! Help! Actually, they're just very caring and hospitable and I'm just looking for a reason to complain because I'm feeling like Little Miss Crabby Pants.

Khemraj has told me that I should neglect my obligations to airplanes and just stay and work here. He is right in his assertion that a bachelor's degree will do virtually nothing to help my understanding of the world. I'm not very tempted, but it's a thought-provoking notion. It's strange, though, because I'm never quite the free spirit I get to be at home while I'm here...if it were acceptable, I would have jumped in the temple's well naked a long time ago. And my initial romanticized views of the organization have changed as more and more of the inter-personal drama has been revealed to me. If this place can't escape the irritating problems of bureacratic inefficiency, lack of funding, lack of consensus, bad coffee, gossip, etc., then no non-profit can. I was wrong to think that there is someplace in the world where morals pave a clear path for do-gooders. We're all doomed to hack our way through the brambles in order to try and accomlish anything at all. Actually, it's a pretty comforting notion, I think, because wherever I go, wherever I work, when these things get in the way I won't have that itching feeling that somwhere else would be better. As an intern with no language skills, I have surrendered myself to feeling slightly useless and now and enjoying the ride. I'm glad I have some college credit as an excuse to do so.

I saw a sign for a "Fool Body Massage." I should start keeping a written record of all the priceless mistranslations around here. Headed to Delhi for the India Social Forum tonight with Karun and Pankach--it should be a really great bus ride!

2006-11-02T00:06:00.000-08:00

Sitting in this curtained internet cafe, I have realized that this is the first time in a long time that I have been alone. Which really speaks to the insanely powerful community I've been living in at Logxiksha in Amu Amar, which is outside of Bhadesar, which is outside of Chittorghar, which is about six hours outside of Jaipur. Which means more or less the middle of a green desert nowhere. The people here really laugh belly laughs and offer more dahl all the time...the first night I was here, about twenty of us sat around a cow dung fire cooking special Rajasthani balls of dough. Khemraj, our age-old Marxist director, believes very strongly that the professionalism of modern NGOs distances them from the real spirit of human rights activism. Only recently Karun applied to recieve foreign funding, but most people seem reluctant to embrace the changes it would imply. There are maybe eight or ten of us that all live in our little office and eat out of our little garden. Finally I'm in a place where it's acceptable not to bathe every day. Every morning I go running through gorgeous countryside to watch the sun rise over a lake next to a temple with a banyan tree that's more than two hundred year old. The priest there has one of the best moustaches I've seen and greets me with a jolly "thank you! thank you!" each morning. The guys here are a lot of fun; they're the first Indian guys I've gotten to be friends with without feeling threatened at all--because they're all twenty two and married with two kids. Shyamji, a member of the Bhil tribe, was a bonded laborer with his father from the time he was twelve until he was fifteen when he decided to run away. After his parents died, when he was seventeen, his three sisters and a grandmother came to live with him. Recently his wife (who he married when he was about four) came to live with him, so this twenty year old guy is providing for six people all by himself. Sadly enough, even they, the human rights defenders, see their wives as cooking-cleaning-child-rearing physical entities, and would much rather hang out with us at the office from dawn til dusk instead of spending time with their families.

The only real issue is that they all speak Hindi. The whole "let's laugh at Sandy because she said/did something that didnt make sense" schtick has lost its novelty for me and the fact that my relationships can't really progress much further is trying my patience. I've been living more or less cheek by jowl with a little dude from Assam who speaks English. He is hilariously eager and takes himself and his work extremely seriously. The other day he took me out to 'conduct a case study' of one community where we'd helped with a land dispute case. The Bhil tribe had been living on one piece of land for more than a thousand years, and when the upper caste tribes decided to construct a road for their newly acquired cars, they deliberately plowed through Bhil houses when it was clearly much easier to go around. It was an absolutely absurd site to behold--it was like someone had given a bully a bulldozer. Anyway, it seemed to lend the village leaders a sense of accomplishment and legitimacy to have a white girl following them around with a digital camera and a notebook.

In a few weeks we're going to camp out on the lawn of the Rajasthani parliament in the hopes that they will surrender welfare funding they promised to our district, and after that we're going on a five day camel-cart tour of the area giving lectures on different human rights issues. I'm hoping to be able to find funding for them to start a girl's school here and hopefully Assam and I will get this youth group under way. This bumpy-motorcycle-ride lifestyle really suits me--I could easily be addicted...a dog I have christened Jordan follows me up the mountains on my rugged moonlight searches for cell phone service. And Pakal fusses over me the way Ashley doe back home, dressing me up with nose rings and Mendhi and jewelry that doesn't make any sense to me.

During my night in Chittorghar at the main Prayas office I made friends with Vikash and Prasand Ajit, who stole my heart under the pretense of teaching me Hindi. Prasand is the geography major son of two Rajasthani human rights activists, and can do a mean impression of Shakira. They tried to come to Bhadesar, but sadly they coudn't fit on Khemraj's motorcycle with me and my embarassingly enormous backpack.

I miss home a lot. I have more or less lost any real sense of purpose or direction in life, and certain traumas remain unresolved...I can see how she dumped her boyfriend afer returning from India...we all need so much less than we think we do. It's sad, but freeing, I guess. I don't know. I have to pee. Where is the bathroom? Does it even exist? Where the hell am I?

2006-10-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Anyway. To continue with drunk retirees Phil and Mike arguing with Abhi about how to change a tire, Phil's head squarely under the axle as the civic balances precariously on the jack. After awhile, we started talking about the use of the word "negro." Abhi told us what his sister in Orlando had said about them, and insisted that Mexicans were the laboring underclass. It might have been the cramped quarters, but all of that talk about how blatantly unfair America is made my stomach fall. Whatever we do, it seems to turn to nothing. Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh.

That night the four of us lay out on the roof taking in he palace and the stars. Val, who has traveled the world over and has been living in Nepal for the last year, more or less shared it all with us...when she came home from a year in Switzerland she cried for two months straight because she couldn't help but feel angry that no one could understand how disjunct America really is. And now, she's realized that almost nothing phases her anymore, that she can shrug off near-death experiences and broken hearts and beautiful sunsets without even a second thought. I wonder what it is that makes her want to leave.

Then we got into the idea that traveling usually amounts to experiences that you haven't shared with anyone else, that change you in ways that others haven't. Val says she takes comfort in the fact that she'll always be a mystery and that there are some stories inside of her that she'll take to her grave. I don't know...what is life if you have no one to bear witness to anything you've done? What the hell does a cartwheel mean if your mom isn't watching? What do you have to live for if you can't tell your husband about everything that's happened at the end of a long day? Why do so many people write memoirs? Why am I writing this online journal with zero comments? Sometimes I feel like I'm living my life just to pad my old age with good memories and to make my grand kids think that I was cool, once upon a time. And I really do believe that a good part of why marriage is important to some is that it can help you find meaning in the darker corners of your own life's cabinets.

Laura, in our group, has decided to stop school because she's become so disenchanted with institutional education. She realizes that she learns far more outside of the classroom than in, and hates the idea of jumping through hoops to superficially prove something to someone else. She's sort of falling into that crisis that I had last fall, but she's actually deciding to go for it, to WWOOF around South Asia and help with an alternative education program in Udaipur. I admire her a lot.

Last year when I didn't decide to take that semester off, after all I was kind of disappointed...I don't know if I'll ever surprise myself with anything I do. Actually I surprise myself every time I defend one of my friends from assholes on the city bus, but I'm thinking more along the lines of running away to join the circus? Circus kehe he? That is Hindi for "Where is the nearest circus?"

Anyway. Our genius mechanic Abhi decided that we were best friends and took us out the next day to a waterfall at Bimla. It was incredible, out of a fairy tale. Out in the desert expanses of desert nothing there is a sharp three hundred foot drop into Heaven. We swam underneath and had an embarassing exit from the water with a few dozen women eyeing us from above.

When he dropped us off, I offered to pay for gas. He was really insulted. It's taken awhile for us to realize that here, extra tips for favors that people do really discredit relationships that they regard as above the level of money. I wrote him a card with a stupid stick figure picture on the front in the hopes that we can salvage some kind of friendship. The four of us giggled our way through dinner, attracted a crowd with our card games at the bus station, and then arrived at Jaipur at three in the morning to pass out in a heap at Val's house.

Vijay picked me up to say goodbye before I leave for Chittorghar...it was really sad. I had no idea that he'd been taking it so seriously, didn't even realize that he even regarded us as a couple in the first place. I'm such a jerk. A jerk that always makes convenient exits from relationships via airplane.

Phewwww. I'm really sad to be leaving Jaipur and everyone I know here, but after everything that happened last night I'm glad I'll only have to walk these streets by myself to come home from this internet cafe, and then never again.

2006-10-24T23:16:00.000-07:00

Sunday was one of those awkward days in which everythign jerks along strangely but eventually works out in the end. Kristen and I headed up an effort to see 'Don,' the Bollywood version of the Matrix, but were so intimidated by the long line of adolescent boys staring us down that we ran and hid in Domino's instead. They still followed us and a few peopel stood outside the glass pickign their noses and staring as we hid our faces and chewed our garlic bread...a security guard started shooing some fo them away with a big stick.

Our plans for Mt Abu were shaken up and eventually we ended up with tickets for an 11:45 pm bus to Bundi, the town where Kipling wrote "The Jungle Book." We decided to kill time in the nearby revolving restaurant, where we could see all of the Vegas-like Divali lighting and fireworks over Jaipur...it was pretty incredible. The restaurant was moving along kind of jerkily, but it was well worth the twelve dollars we spent there. While I was looking for the bathroom I wandered into the nether-regions of the mechanics of the building, but I couldn't get a good look because someone came and I had to scurry away. Afterwards we stopped at a hotel, heard Val's stories of how she is technically married to her boyfriend's brother in Nepal because she wanted to get him a work visa to the States, and took our habit of telling everyone we're Canadian to an unprecedented level. When we got up to leave, a guy insisted on getting us dessert "because it was his birthday"...but after giggling and telling him that sure, we like paneer, but in Canada we eat it with gravy and our fathers wear red coats and big brown hats, we skedaddled. Slept like a rock on the bus, but Libby was so groped that she was in tears by the time we arrived at three in the morning to the middle of nowhere.

The next morning I woke up early at our gorgeous little Hotel KatKoun and drank my masala tea with two adventurous girls from Australia and Sweden and two hilarious retired British railway workers in golf caps and fanny packs. I fell in love with them and the charming management, Raghu and Chinto. Chinto has is the three-time Rajasthani boxing champion. And Monty is the long-haired tour guide with friends coming out his ears. We were loud and lingered far too long over breakfast, but after awhile we started wandering the streets and ofund the Bundi palace. Which was absolutely amazing. We climbed further up the hill in our good company talking philosophy with old men questioning whether or not they'd thrown their lives away as they hufffed and puffed up cumbling stairs. The fort at the top was completely deserted...it's so strange, in India there are so many thigns that escape the guidebooks and are still crumbling under Banyan trees virtually unnoticed. I felt like my eight year old self again wandering around those ruins through all of the little passageways and catacombs. On the way down we had an encounter with a pack of monkeys that scared me so much I had to sit down to keep my knees from shaking afterward. You know, as much as I generally resent chauvinism, I really appreciate it when giant packs of screaming monkeys with sharp teeth and rabies are involved.

Afterwards a man in hilarious eighties sunglasses led us to his guest house where we met his family and watched the sun set over the palace and the rest of the city from the roof. A guy sat silently with us during dinner, and kind of puzzled us by interrupting our heavy conversation with "YOU ARE ENJOYING BUNDI?" over and over again. My guess was that he was there with his slingshot to protect us from the oncoming monkeys, but that's just because we've started to find it less emotionally trying to give strange men the benefit of the doubt when they dont' seem threatening.

Afterwards, we ended up with the entirety of the hotel crew shoved into little cars and packed onto motorcycles to a rooftop dinner party at someone's old farm estate. It was a really great time--one of the first times we've gotten to really hang out with Indians in a social setting without feeling threatened and where our cultural insensitivities and loudness are appreciated. The stars were incredible. On the way home we ended up shoved into a very small car with very large British men...my head was resting on the dashboard. We popped a tire in the midle of nowhere and awkwardly fumbled around with the jack and had arguments about which words constitute racial slurs.

I wish I could really sit down and write one cohesive post, but I'm being whisked off somewhere else right now!

2006-10-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

Just now as I was wandering back from Val's house in C-Scheme, a little crusty from our journey, a rickshaw wallah stopped me and shouted in impeccable English uncharacteristic of drivers that he'd give me a ride to Raja Park for only thirty rupees because he'd seen me as a student in Jaipur before, and he thinks that women should be educated. This man has somekind of white burn marks and some open lesions all over his skin and teeth ruined by the tobacco stuff they chew around here, but his eyes were very honest. He asked about my pending degree in international development and said he himself had a master's in economics from Rajasthan University He started telling me that his parents died when he was very young, and he'd been living on his own since he was four years old, and his uncle had taken all of his inheritance. He said that we all should work hard, honestly, and enjoy our lives as much as we can. He said that sometimes it's difficult for him to enjoy his life because he is always alone, and that sometimes he is ashamed because he has a hard time earning a living...I said that I didn't know how a person should be judged, but it certainly shouldn't be by his income. He gave me his best wishes for a good life and advised to be home by eight every night because otherwise I won't be safe--but he said I'm an intelligent girl, I can use my best judgement.

Walking around the streets on the holidays when it isn't so crowded really makes me feel much more at home; I can smile and wave at people I know without giving someone else the impression that it's okay to reach out from their motorcycles and grab at me. Life has been a lot more satisfying as I learn the situations in which it's okay to let down my guard and let my facial expressions melt from the look of death. Things are easier to understand, I recognize the songs on the radio and I like it here. I think one of the main things about getting to know India, or anywhere, is that certain superflous differences cloud our vision of people living their daily lives. At first when you think of India you think of the colorful sarees and unfamiliar sitar music and thigns along thsoe lines, but gradually you just see people working to get by, and the promenance of those very stimulating phenomena are pushed to the periphery.

I guess one of the other abstract thoughts that have been floating around my head is that a lot of the pity we think is due to people in developing nations is downright silly. There is no reason to think that every person in the world should have a hardwood floor when dirt works just fine, or a western toilet when something else works better...yes, outrage is justified in some cases, but a lot of the time our focus on the material wellbeing of people is over-emphasized because we don't realize how little is really essential to life.

And while I'm at it, I might as well throw in another dilemma...this weekend when we were climbing the mountain with the old British guys (I'll explain later) I kind of outlined how my thought process about poverty has gone. They asked what my response is to beggars on the street--one of thsoe very simple questions that I still haven't figured out a consistent answer to. Anyway. I went into how helping people get food in their stomachs is definitely essential, but after awhile of practicing straight charity any well-intentioned person would start to wonder if there were some way of doing something more sustainable. Then you step into that sticky realm of development and poverty relief that comes with all sorts of moral questions attached. And now, the phase that I've reached is that I'm wondering how much all of this attention paid to people's material physical and material well-being really contributes to them leading a mroe meaningful life. I might end up being a summer camp counselor for the rest of my life after all.

To play devil's advocate to all of the social justice work i've ever done in my life, one part of me is always remembering good ol' Osho's words that the freest person in the world is the one who is happy wearing hsi chains. All of these people on the streets, no matter what they've been through or how little they have, are still able to love others and experience life and ask questions. No one can ever lose the things that are most important. This certainly is not to negate the validity of working for change--there is a lot of shit out there that is really fucked up. I guess I just mean it as a sort of comforting notion.

Anyway. This weekend was awesome.

2006-10-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

You can never go wrong with hookah on a cool night with coffee ice cream and butterflies in your stomach. After a chance meeting at an internet cafe we finally have some new friends for a day or two. I am definitely going to miss how unpredictable life can be here--always seeing the strangest things and learning about entire new universes. I just saw man ride by on a bike trailing a wagon piled sky high with rolling office chairs.

Today is Divali, the Indian equivalent of Christmas. The entire city is decorated with lights and every home has garlands of marigolds over their doors. I'm about to go dress up and go for puja at Mr. Bhatia's business, and then probably eat far too many sweets for my delicate metabolism. People lead such personal lives; have a few friends outside of their familes that they hold dear!

Crap I have to go againnnnnnnnnnnnn

2006-10-18T04:16:00.000-07:00

I never know how we do it, but somehow we navigated the completely unintelligible and seemingly illogical and unnecessarily loud station to hop a bus to Pushkar, backpacker Mecca of India. The town is a reputably holy city situated on a lake in an oasis of a valley out in the desert that was overrun by hippies back in the sixties and is thriving off of the residual crunchy Westerners that pass through out of curiosity.

On the bus we met two Danish girls named Gunovar and Heidi, and a charming French fellow named Lionel. I made characteristically awkward conversation, but we got to know them pretty well and I really fell for those European suckers. They all were in the disorienting period after graduation, and they are still searching for an authentic purpose in life in the face of many friends who have gone for phony ones. The other man next to me on the bus was a gregarious yet wise businessman from Jaipur who said he tried to really connect with people all the time and used me as an example. He taught me some acupressure points and read my palm…he said some things that struck me as wrong, and a few things that struck me as something he might say to anyone at all…buuuutt he said that I’d been living on my own, away from my family for some years and it’s going to stay that way for awhile. He said that I like to be alone, and that I can get very angry sometimes, and that I worry too much. I have a good, clean heart and a simple, too-trusting mind that combine to help others take advantage of me, and I’m destined to have a very healthy home-life whenever I settle down. The alone-ness prediction made me a little sad because I’ve been looking forward to a time when I can live in a community…and I like to think of myself as someone who enjoys the presence of others. What's a lonely cowgirl to do?
Annyway. The Pushkar lake, once you get away from the crowds of good-looking young men hired to woo lost backpackers to particular hostels, is incredible. The pace of life is slow and there really is an undeniable Good Vibration in the air. Maybe it’s all of the carcinogens that have been peed into that water over the years. Our room had four double doors that opened out onto the lake where we could watch everyone doing Puja and bathing early in the morning. There are enormous fish that jump four or five feet out of the water every once in awhile. We watched the sunset from the Eastern steps as jugglers and musicians and little boys painted blue like Shiva ran around jingling their jars of change. Maybe we lingered too long at dinner, maybe we didn’t.

The next morning we woke up at five to climb up a "mountain" to the Saraswati temple. As I gazed up at the holy moon I stepped in some holy cow shit, Aristotle-style. The sunrise was incredible, rivaled only by the one I saw from the top of Dragon’s Tooth back in ol' Virginny. We gave into temptation and had breakfast at the Pink Floyd Café, with shit-tastic service, bugs in the coffee and nutella served on stale Garlic naan. To its credit, the café did name all the rooms after albums and the bathroom was called "Paradise" and there was a room designated for drinking "Very Special Lassi," but overall the view from the roof was its saving grace. It’s pretty hilarious to find which random artifacts of American culture have been smuggled through international borders.

One of our companions had been suffering a terrible urinary tract infection for a week and hadn’t been able to decipher the Indian medical system enough of figure out that she could buy whatever prescription medicines her little heart desired. I stood there helping her understand the funny little pharmacist’s accent as he asked "if the pee is flowing freshly or it is burning" over and over and over again.

At the Brahma temple I didn’t have a scarf to cover my head, so a random guy took off his shirt and draped it over me. The line between people laughing with me and people laughing at me was definitely violated, and the line between being a respectful observer and an obnoxious American was trampled.

We again took forever at the sunset and dinner, and then they all came back to our hotel room to share stories of China, where they’d been traveling for weeks, of the incessant spitting and the women who never cut their hair…they all really enchanted me with the notion of going off backpacking on my own. I think it would be great to go off somewhere by myself, but it never occurs to me. This summer I had some sort of a vague desire to be more self-referential, to not need others’ company and approval so intensely, and I’ve definitely moved in that direction. I guess it all comes at a price.

Ajmer, the city nearby, is closer to reality but the people there were so much more friendly and easier to trust than in Jaipur. They told us the wrong directions and welcomed us into shops to drink chai for the sake of conversation…the city was beautiful, and the Muslim sector was distinct. Muslims account for a small percentage of the population here in India and they certainly suffer from the side effects of the conflict with Pakistan, but this community in Ajmer was so joyful and true. It was strange to see butcher’s shops and animals being skinned on the street. My vegetarianism of old is back with a vengeance. Damn it.

The Durga of the Sufi Saint Chisti was one of the most amazing places I’ve been in my life. There are several tall archways that bring you out into a large foyer all in marble and turquoise, with people carrying platters of rose petals to the shrine and incense beckoning everyone to think about the present moment for awhile. A student of the Koran showed us around and took us back to his room, and we sat and listened to people singing with an accordian for awhile. I guess that wa the first time I really experienced the intense joy and sense of community that strict religious practice can bring. They are definitely onto something.

We ran into the "Robson United Methodist Church," which of course threw me into all sorts of annoying philosophical questions about colonialism and missionary work and development and all of that crap. Then I bought some ice cream. We scoured a park for any evidence of the "paddle-boating" so celebrated by our guide book, but when we found the lake the water was so green that Libby's gag reflex wouldn't let us think twice about hopping on the pink plastic swan bobbing through the trash. On the bus on the way home I talked awhile with a guy who was broken-hearted because he'd fallen in love with a Muslim girl but their families would never let them marry. I had to bite my tongue to keep from shoving him in the direction of 'following his heart.' It's really hard for me to decide what my place is here...my Indian friends told me, more than anything else, to come here with an open mind. They're right, because there are so many things that rub me the wrong way and can incite a violent reaction from me if I let them, but really, we all have to pick our battles. If I got upset about everything there is to get upset about, about our servant getting paid $26 a month for twelve hour days without a days off, about the women being treated like so much flesh, about the corruption of government officials crippling what could be an incredible democracy...I'd go insane.

After I sat by my cell phone worried to death about my friend who'd called from a rick shaw taking her somewhere she didn't know, the whole experience of how truly awful men can be has gotten overwhelming. I can't remember feeling this angry or helpless since I was in preschool. Why do men think they can treat us this way? Beacuse they can. Because we can yell and scream all we want and they can go on jeering and grabbing to their heart's content. Indian girls are almost always expected to be home by sundown, and who's to say that they should have more freedom if it comes at such a high cost?

Eeeven so. I saw a dog happily trotting around with its skull cracked open and its brain exposed the other day. "Hold my chocolate bar, I'm going to save that puppy. Yesterday, after a glass of orange juice at a club decorated with cobwebs and skeletons, Vijay scooted me around on his motorcycle to see the city all lit up for Divali. It was really fun, but I think I'm going to abstain from motorcycles in Indian traffic from now on.

2006-10-12T20:37:00.001-07:00

This past weekend, several of us travelled out to visit "the Colonel" at his polo estate. It is a little bizarre to see so much green grass out in the desert. We wandered around and recieved a strange tour of "the village" nearby, and then went back to chatter with the other rich people scattered around. Eventually he insisted that Libby, Kristen, and I go for a dip in the pool. To our delight, the bottom of the pool was covered in slime so we could slide around and sign our names in the sludge...the Colonel walked up and explained that his first well had run dry, so he sank another 400-footer just so he could fill his pool and water the lawn. He went on to say his son is an investment banker making $25 million every year just to sustain an interest in polo--which is just about the most expensive hobby around. As we stared up at him from the pool, the video crew from the polo match decided that the white girls in the pool was the perfect introductory shot--particularly when they brought us the imported beer. The club professional photographer asked our names for some caption on the brochure, and the Colonel interjected with "oh, I forget their names but they're just pretty faces so that's all thats important!" Kristen and Libby are women's studies majors, and really started to protest when the photographers egged us on to pose, and overall it was extremely awkward, and at awkward times in the conversation very large dead bugs and soggy trash floating in the water would brush my side and I'd jump.

The match itself was pretty exciting. A lot of the villagers watched from the sides, and after the match during the prize ceremony a policeman walked around with a stick and slapped at the uppityones that tried to sit in front of the white line. We went to high tea with women wearing golden polo stick necklaces and various polo players of all shapes and sizes...I was manipulated into yet another awkward conversation with a young guy and after maybe five minutes of midunderstanding accents about a dozen people jumped out from behind a corner and shouted "YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA!" Apparently the joke was on him--he was supposed to say akward things in the presence of a blonde girl flirting with him. Awkward--the word of the day. Week. Month. I did everything possible to promote the stereotype of blonde American girls as "forward." Go me. Afterwards they invited us to a very swanky after-party. My host family didn't want me to go--in their opinion, I think, the polo players are pretty crass. Crass they are. Apparently the whole party was flooded with random foreign women who are invited more to contribute to the atmosphere than anything else.

It's strange, sometimes our white skin gets us treated like whores, and other times it commands an unorthodox amount of respect and admiration. The other day I went with Dr. Gupta, the charismatic and genuine founder of a really great health NGO, to a meeting where I would meet the person I'm going to be interning with in a few weeks. RIght now, the plan is that I'll be living in the village of Bhadesar, which is outside of Chittorgarh, which is outside of Udaipur, where no one even really speaks Hindi--working on Dalit land rights. Dr. Gupta led us into a room with a circular table with one microphone at each seat and dozens of people were yelling at each other in Hindi. Two men got up from the center table and gave us their seats, so Jessica and I sat in the crossfire of this argument feeling bewildered and recieiving important-looking documents in Hindi. Eventually, we figured what it was all about.

Basically, the food distribution system is set up such that everyone who falls below the poverty line recieves government-subsidied food, fuel, and other living commodities. Every few years the government conducts a census, decides who is poor, and issues them ration cards. Apparently the census that was taken in 2002 just took effect, and it has been found that thousands of poor families were excluded and have lost their benefits. So, there were representatives from several panchayats (village councils) who had put in requests with the Supreme Court that the census be thrown out. The other side of the argument was that the methodology of the census ought to be changed before the next one in 2007. The government representatives were peeved because they'd been asked to re-survey so many times, and everyone else was furious with the bureaucratic process.

One man was particularly fiery, and I found out that this was Khemraj, my intern host. By reputation he is the farthest left you can be in the NGO community--he thinks that NGOs here have diluted their grassroots spirit with all of this professionalism and organizational mumbo jumbo. He organizes Dalits to protest land takeover by development projects. I have been forewarned that he definitely won't go out of his way to make sure I'm comfortable (as in, have a toilet to pee in or a sheet to sleep on). I met his assistant--an Indian girl who had gone to U Texas, Austin for three years to study telecommunications and then went through some kind of existential overhaul and ended up on the dirt floor of this office out in the boonies. She seems wonderful, and I'm glad that there will be at least one person who speaks English. All of this sends chills down my spine.

Yesterday Jeremy and I were walking past the University of Rajasthan, and noticed a sign advertising a law conference on human rights. We wandered in out of curiosity, and awkwardly stood under a tent where everyone was eating a buffet lunch. People welcomed us as foreigners and within a few minutes the principal of the law school had our pictures taken with him ("this is very memorable moment. honor that you are here.") and we were asked to give a lecture at their next conference. They had absolutely no idea who we are beyond the fact that we were American, but they kept shoving ice cream at us so we didn't attempt to escape. We sat in on a few lectures. They were, as to be expected, very vague and general but passionately so...similar to an academic conference in the states but with heavy accents. One guy made a comment about America going to Iraq and Afghanistan merely to assert our status as a developed country, and I went up to the podium and responded, but they all smiled and nodded so fervently that I don't think they caught a word through my accent.

Sheila, Shobha and I are getting more and more upset every day with the way Purnima is treated. She sneaks to the balcony and whispers with the servant next door, who is apparently recieving clothes and medicine for her family back in the villages. Purnima gets less than a dollar every day and she works very hard all day long. She's pissed about it. She's warmed up to me and Sheila a lot, but her way of showing affection is often playfully hitting us with metal pots and spraying me with the hose. Jeremy is convinced that it isn't cultural difference, she's just absolutely nuts. Very true.

A big crowd of us went out to a bar yesterday--I have really relished all three drops of alcohol I've had in this country. Vijay came and seemed to be a little more clear in his expectations. He seems perfectly normal except for frequent bizarre text messages.

The other night Shobha, her friend Adite, Sheila and I went to the City Palace and more or less just made fun of the tourists. Shobha convinced us to take a ride in a rickety horse-drawn cart, which was great--I have no idea how the driver can convince that poor animal to make hairpin turns in that rushing traffic. Giggle giggle giggle all the way home.

2006-10-03T04:45:00.000-07:00

Now I’m sitting on the terrace, a little drowsy, a little disoriented, rashy, and unsure of what the hell I’m doing here in India. It’s better that I came, I know, it’s an adventure that will help me grow as a person—another semester at home would have left me feeling stagnant and in a funk. I am usually so drowsy that I don’t really feel like myself; I’m kind of unimpressed with my ability to make the most of things. Actually this past weekend was pretty wonderful; gave me a little bit more of a sense that I’m not just floating around on a tourist train. Nothing like a little rash to renew your sense of rustic adventure.

The highlight, so far, I guess has been the dancing. Every year there are nine days of Nivitra, and on every night there is an enormous dance held. Everyone between the cradle and the grave dresses up in their best sarees and jewelry, and they dance in circles for hours upon end. There are two types—one with hand clapping and the other called dandhya, in which you have a piar of stick in your hands and you and your partner hit the sticks together while you prance around in complicated swirls. I was completely enamored with it…Val asked some university boys to teach us, and they took us under their wings and flashed us into the VIP seating section with some special card. There aren’t many celebrations in our culture where all ages are invited and enthusiastic. It’s really overpowering energy and light and color—the guys looked so ecstatic to be out there.

The first night was a little awkward because they didn’t want to teach, they just wanted us to know it and to dance with them. The jumbo-vision followed us blonde girls religiously, even in our jerkiest movements, and someone from the stage introduced the Americans to a crowd of thousands. Rajev is very sweet and polite and eager to introduce us to new people, and his friends are likewise eager but a little bit more stern in their demands that I learn each step precisely on the first try. The second night we went back with Libby, Antonia, and Tess, and we met a sweet girl named Priyanka…this time Kristen and I finally found our rhythm and it started being really fun instead of an ordeal!

Although Kristen probably deserved it more, I was nominated for Best Foreign Dancer, and I went up to the judges table in front of all those thousands to receive my prize (a suitcase). After that children beamed at me and others stared, probably critiquing me down to the bone…I had a big, awkward suitcase that Rajev grabbed from me and luged around from stall to stall until he found someone to watch it for me for the rest of the evening. It’s so nice—not all Indian men are so rude! The rest of the time everyone was dancing cheesy camp dances—I was enamored, in love…pretending to set off fireworks, mooning people. It was great. People called the next day to tell me I was on the repeating loop for the news, and my picture was in the paper. "Foreigner priveledge" at its finest.

This weekend we went to Agra. Standing at the bus station, and being in the presence of Libby, really calls attention to how absurdly loud it is here and how many irritating noises are tolerated all the time. Some large truck had gotten stuck in reverse and was making a high-pitched beeping noise somewhere behind us. When the noise finally stopped I was about to comment when someone next to us started to fix the horn on his motorcycle. The horns are all assortments of trumpets and squeaks and hoots—some of which are pretty hilarious. A man in the bathroom at the halfway house opened the stall door for me, graciously surrendered the toilet paper, opened it back up for me when I was done, turned on the sink, insisted on soap, and tore off a luxuriously long piece of paper for me to dry off my hands. He makes his entire living handing toilet paper to tourists and demanding a tip. People jump on the bus just as it pulls away to sell trinkets and sewing kits and open packs of Starbursts—it really looks like they stole someone's purse and are selling everything inside--"THREE PENS. ONE BREATH MINT." Once they give up they jump back off the moving bus again. The long, sweaty bus rides took a toll on my skin, and I pretty much have broken out in an ugly, burning rash all over me.

When we got to Agra, a man barged up the aisles of the bus and demanded that we grab our backpacks, generally treating us like idiots because we’d been on the bus for too long. We got off, the bus rolled away, and we realized we were nowhere near the tourist sector…and then the man in the red shirt rolled up in a rickshaw and told us to hop in for 200 rupees. While we searched for the address of our hostel a swarm gathered and they fought to peer over our shoulders to see where we were going. We ran away at a faster pace than ever until we found an unassuming boy in a swarm who took us to the Taj Grange pollution-free zone.

Having Jeremy with us to talk in Hindi makes the whole world so much less intimidating-people shout a lot, yes, but often they’re trying to convey a point that is more helpful than ‘buy something from me.’ The group was fantastic, I enjoyed every second with them and it was hard not to stay up late talking all the time.

The Taj Mahal is entirely worthy of its reputation. Many tourist sights, I feel, are over-hyped to the point that they aren’t so worthwhile to see. But the first glance at the Taj is really something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. One man built it in memory of his wife. The incredible devotion it took…hard to believe. Afterwards we made like Europeans and lounged around the hotel restaurant for about four or five hours.

We stopped in the small town of Bharatpur and wandered around the neighborhood. In an enormous dirt field, there were perhaps six or seven games of cricket going on, and hundreds of kids on bikes. We stoped to watch, and after a few minutes a crowd gathered and awkward conversation in broken Hindi and broken English ensued. Eventually Laura and I sweet-talked our way into letting us ride their bikes around and teaching us cricket. After awhile the crowd got so claustrophobic and their demands that we sing and dance so perverse that we left...A crowd of maybe twenty or thirty guys followed us up the steet, so we set off in a direction opposite our hotel in the hopes that we might lose them. It took awhile, but we did lose them, and ended up being escorted around by an old woman who wanted to show us all of the different temples in the town. People always insist that we shouldn't feel awkward or intrusive, but the feeling never goes away. On the way home Jeremy let down his guard long enough to talk to one boy who turned out toe be an English student who invited us to his home. It turns out he's the son of a police officer, and lives in the kind of house that you'd imagine about India--seven or eight people in a small cement flat with two string beds and a buffalo outside. They gave us some of the best chai we've ever had and invited us for holiday (last day of Nivitra) food the next day. Mahesh (the student) came with us to ride bikes around the bird sanctuary the next day. The bikes we rented were pretty fantastic--pedals going in all angles and not even a trace of brakes on mine. The sanctuary was beautiful; reminded me of Assateague Island...it was just great to get away from all the noise for a little while. Libby and I taught some old folk songs to the group so we spent more time just happily pedaling around singing than actually looking for birds.

My rash got to be a bit much for me so a few of us went home earlier...I swear to God, I hadn't listened to even a trace of music before someone lent me their i-Pod and it reminded me of an entire side of forgetting logistics and appreciating life than I had felt in a long time.

There are people waiting impatiently and staring at me in this internet cafe anda I can't tell if it's just because they want to stare or if they want to convey a point.

Yesterday was Dusshera, the day when they burn effigees of the demon god. It was absolutely incredible! 30,000 people squeezed into a tiny park with hundreds of vendors to see two 150 foot paper mache figures of Ravan burn to the ground. There were a lot of fireworks and plenty of hot ash and embers sprinkled over the crowd. Nothing here ever appears safe. The ferris wheel was powered by several men turning a hand cranks, and when they wanted it to stop they would grab a bar and drag their feet. It's insaaaannnnnneeee...When the fireworks were over there was a huge stampede of people headed for the gates. We watched from the roof of our house, so we were fortunate to avoid a lot of the hubbub.

And today we went to the planetarium, but all of the dialogue was from the 1980's and in Hindi so I just fell asleep.

2006-09-23T01:52:00.000-07:00

It's so insanely overwhelming to come to these dingy little rooms with fans blowing hot air on a dozen or so silent people on computers, and to feel like I might be able to sum up my thoughts. It is dammmnnnn hot.

Last weekend a few of us broke away from the group to hop a train to Jodhpur. After navigating the lines at a train station teeming with people, we opted for the cheapest tickets ($2, instead of the $5 first class). It was a little insane. While we waited on the platform several people walked up to us and asked to take pictures of us with their cell phones, and we halfway made friends with a Jaipur girls' soccer team that had been staring at us with arms folded for a good half hour...when the train finally came there was a mad rush on the doors--they didn't allow people to get off the train and certainly didn't yield to mothers with infants--on the local trains some people hop through the windows on the back side just as it's leaving. Paul and Jeremy ended up perched in an overhead compartment, and I balanced at the aisle edge of a bench with an extended family in what I thought might be its entirety. A swarm of teenage boys heckled us for an hour or so until the family welcomed me into their folds and started teaching me parts of the body in Hindi. They were really great. Those of us who have some degree of fluency in Hindi made friends, I more or less had my fair share of awkward smiling and clueless giggling. One man kindly showed me all of the five hundred background images that came with his cell phone, and whenever a picture of a blonde-haired Claire Danes or Nichole Kidman or Paris Hilton came up he would say "It's you!"

Our hotel, to my delight, was painted banana yellow, inside and out. Our rickshaw driver never really explained where he was taking us so every site was a surprise. The old Marwar city was incredible, and we kept finding new temples and inlets wherever we wandered. There was a cow perched up at the tip-top of the tallest part of the tallest fort on the tallest hill--and if it's true that cows won't go down stairs, something was awry. The medieval fort put whatever one can see in Europe to shame--actually, all of the physical history here seems so much bigger, more vivid and accentuated and richer and more meaningful than Europe in general.

I'd been feeling a little bit stopped up and not as present, but I think I found god again on the way home...I saw the sun rise over the desert and all of those misty fields of millet complete with women tending cattle and the occasional peacock. It's hard to remember what the landscape is like when we're in the city, but once you move out it becomes more apparent that this place is so expansive, there is always so much to learn.

The next day I made a mildly stupid mistake and impulsively followed a gaggle of girls into a beauty parlour and was convinced to get my arms waxed. What the hell? Because it only costs a dollar or two a pop, all of the women are hairless in all of the places I'm aware of and it isn't prudent to ask about anywhere else. I made it extremely clear to the stylist in exagerrated gestures that I only wanted half my arms done, and she nodded and smiled and painted me up to the shoulder. The whole salon burst out in a fit of giggles when she deliberately tore away my follicles up to my scapula. I laughed too, but the fact remains that I look like a naked mole rat. And, to top it off, now it's become a group joke to loudly ask me "how my rash is doing" in public.

2006-09-13T06:28:00.000-07:00

Now I am in Jaipur. I feel about 80% sure that there is urine on my feet right now, but that is just kind of a fact of life around here. I am in love with my host family. Things are much easier than I had anticipated--I have my own room and they all speak English and they're very sweet to me. I gave Mrs. Bhatia a long back rub in the first few days and since then she's greeted me with a song and a pear whenever I see her.

They have a servant woman who has emigrated from Bengal--she's very shy, and from what I've gathered she lives in the closet upstairs and has been sending home money to her two sons ever since she was widowed several years ago. We've done some reading on master-servant psychosocial relationship blahblahblah, but it certainly feels awful to apply those dry academic concepts to a living, breathing human being standing in front of you. Here equality is not a given value, and it isn't even necessarily one that everyone will publicly subscribe to. The disparities are similar in the US--the difference is that there are so many people living in such small a small space that one can't live in denial of privelege the way you can when you live in the suburbs and poor people are far away. There are so many heartwrenching stories written on people's faces. Outside the temple of Ganesh today, a woman was trying to coax a very clearly sick baby into drinkign some water from the temple's tap. When she and some other children came to beg from us, a policeman walked up with a wooden stick and beat them away.

Ugh, and it feels awfully cliche to be recounting stories of poverty as a student studying abroad. Then again, the whole thought process I've gone through about genuine solutions to poverty has led me to this program. I hope this whole experience doesn't amount to me simply justifying to myself in a superficial and forced way why I should not give everything away and live in the woods. Sometimes I'm filled with wonder, and sometimes I'm kind of struck by how mundane everyone's comments and my own thoughts seem to be. It's been odd to have to warp my personality around to avoic seeming flirty or friendly or smiley at all to anyone-disorienting at the least, kind of freeing at the most.

My host father and I exchanged books--I gave him the Prophet and he gave me the teachings of Osho, who was apparently very popular in the 70's. Amazing for sure,more on that later.

I have to go eat dinner now, but I just wanted to end on the fact that my friend is staying in a house with three dogs that are half German Shepherd, half Wolf, and their names are Bruno, Droopy, and Precious.

2006-09-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

I just made a somewhat graceful exit from a dance party with Tushti, the spunky ten-year old girl I'm living with here in Jaipur. A few moments of peace. Actually every time I say that I jinx it right away so I'll stop saying it altogether. Moments of peace are overrated, right? For the most part, people here are used to being around others all the time--alone time is for religious zealots, hospital patients, child molesters or otherwise upsetting characters. So being alone in a public place is particularly odd, and being blonde and female in a public place is downright outlandish. Something that should be stared at unflinchingly, allll the time!

Our plane flew from Chicago over the North Pole into New Delhi. I took a sleeping pill, but the man next to me really wanted to talk and would wake me up to ask me questions aboud how many audomobeels i has and how de dope is very cheap whenever he was bored, and I unfortunately am not very articulate or adept at decoding accents when I'm on potent sedatives. Many are curious, but that's just because in general they are in the habit of asking questions. We met someone at the airport, and they loaded us onto buses to the Delhi YWCA (kind of like a hostel). I brought far less luggage than everyone else, which is great for me, but I guess bad for hte people who have to sit next to me when I haven't done laundry in awhile. The highways and streets are certainly crowded with smaller cars and three-wheeled autorickshaws and the like, but there is far more of a method to the madness than one might discern at first. Yes, there are occasionally herds of camels and an elephant or two. People honk whenever they pass, so more or less all the time--if they stayed in lanes or followed our system of driving this number of people would be in everlasting gridlock.

My group is seventeen sweet girls, five somewhat sheepish boys, and in all extremely friendly. It's been great so far. There are a few people here that are well-versed in Hindi that have been leading us all around like pied pipers. It felt a little bit like the first few weeks of college with everyone desperate to make good first impressions, but now that that's over all is well. My roommate from the first night, Libby, seems to be straight out of Quaker camp. Maybe the jet lag had something to do with it, but we had some great teary-eyed conversations to boot us in the right direction. We woke up around five, so we went on a walk around the block. There is an absolutely gorgeous Sikh temple next door, as well as a children's safety town where kids can drive tiny cars on tiny roads and heed itty bitty traffic signals. The weather is consistently sunny and beautiful, flowers are gorgeous...On our first day of orientation we spent several hours in a classroom, all while our enchanting program director Rima strained to shout above the din of some sort of pop concert that was going on outside. Libby and I wandered around this concert during lunch, and soon found ourselves pulled up on the stage of an enormous girls' dance party. I balked at the idea of being made a spectacle at first, but if I decide to balk at everything that might be offensive or politicaly incorrect here I think I might find myself in a speechless funk pretty soon. We were quite the novelty--they snicker at my dancing the same way my friends back in the states do, but at least here I can attribute any awkwardness to "cultural difference."

That night we navigated the metro to an absolutely enormous bazaar near the Red Fort in the middle of New Delhi. This is where you\'ll find those scenes of thousands upon thousands of people and rickshaws and bicycles on tiny streets, and tangles of powerlines dangling overhead. Not many people actually pay for their own electricity. Men stare stare stare stare--ankles and shins and fair skin stand out. I could write ages upon pages about women's issues from what I've observed in the past week...what I'm told is that Indian men are taught to treat every woman like a mother or a sister, but as soon as they see foreign women they know that we don't fit into that system of values and thus throw all restraint out the window. People on the plane told me to carry sharp pins with me on buses so I can poke whoever "pokes" me. Nothing like that has happened, but it\'s clear that outside of the small circle into which I've been introduced, all of my interactions with people are influenced by that paradigm. Women keep themselves wrapped up, which has its disadvantages in terms of self expression and freedom in our eyes, but it is a much more peaceful existence to not always be distracted in one way or another by constant efforts or deliberate non-efforts to make oneself attractive. And living even just one week without giving it a thought makes me realize how much subconscious energy I, and all girls, expend on that in the States. It's become far easier to understand why certain Indian women might view American women in miniskirts with disdain or pity. And there isn\'t any real way of saying which way is better, because none of us can ever really experience both approaches.

We made a five minute stop at the prime minister's estate. They have the equivalent of a national mall with the India gate, where people can spread out with a picnic or have a paddle boat ride in a giant swan across the reflecting pool. The beggars here are every bit as upsetting as I'd been bracing myself...here the children will grab onto your hands and walk with you for as long as they can--whether it's five seconds or twenty minutes. I guess I'll let the whole anxiety about poverty thing be for awhile because I'm sure we'll be discussing it a lot in our classes. I guess you really become familiar with that stone place in your heart when you can look into the eyes of a boy tapping on your car window for the full five minutes of the traffic light and the whole time shake your head no. Actually the other thing I have to say about that is that because it isn't so easy to skate through life without thinking the way it is for some in America, becuase you have to actively seek out your niche and find a way to live, people are creative. I saw a man on the street with a bathroom scale who would weigh you for money.

That night we braved the metro to an absolutely enormous bazaar near the Red Fort in the middle of New Delhi. This is where you'll find those scenes of thousands upon thousands of people and rickshaws and bicycles on tiny streets, and tangles of powerlines dangling overhead. Not many people actually pay for their own electricity. Men stare stare stare stare--ankles and shins and fair skin stand out. I could write ages upon pages about women's issues from what I've observed in the past week...what I'm told is that Indian men are taught to treat every woman like a mother or a sister, but as soon as they see foreign women they know that we don't fit into that system of values and thus throw all restraint out the window. People on the plane told me to carry sharp pins with me on buses so I can poke whoever "pokes" me. Nothing like that has happened, but it's clear that outside of the small circle into which I've been introduced, all of my interactions with people are influenced by that paradigm. Women keep themselves wrapped up, which has its disadvantages in terms of self expression and freedom in our eyes, but it is a much more peaceful existence to not always be distracted in one way or another by constant efforts or deliberate non-efforts to make oneself attractive. And living even just one week without giving it a thought makes me realize how much subconscious energy I, and all girls, expend on that in the States. It's become far easier to understand why certain Indian women might view American women in miniskirts with disdain or pity. And there isn't any real way of saying which way is better, because none of us can ever really experience both approaches.

We made a five minute stop at the prime minister's estate, which really puts our own White House to shame. They have the equivalent of a national mall with the India gate, where people can spread out with a picnic or have a paddle boat ride in a giant swan across the reflecting pool. The beggars here are every bit as upsetting as I'd been bracing myself...here the children will grab onto your hands and walk with you for as long as they can--whether it's five seconds or twenty minutes. I guess I'll let the whole anxiety about poverty thing be for awhile because I'm sure we'll be discussing it a lot in our classes. I guess you really become familiar with that stone place in your heart when you can look into the eyes of a boy tapping on your car window for the full five minutes of the traffic light and the whole time shake your head no. Actually the other thing I have to say about that is that because it isn't so easy to skate through life without thinking the way it is in America, becuase you have to actively seek out your niche and find a way to live, people are creative. I saw a man on the street with a bathroom scale who would weigh you for money.

Enter Tushti on roller skates. Exit Tushti on roller skates. She is excellent.

On the way out of Delhi we stopped at Gurgaon. This place is a flat plane with a number of enormous high-rise condominiums sprouting out of the ground next to slums thrown together for the people that construct them. We listened to a lecture on Indian architectural design, and in particular medeival architecture. There are forts scattered throughout Rajasthan--the medeival history is as alive here as it is in Europe. Some food for thought: Indian architecture tends to go from the center outward--traditionally, they would find the center of the courtyard, and build going outward from there. Western design principles generally dictate that one defines the border and builds inward from there. When colonial-style bungalows came along, Indian families still slept outside on the lawn and kept men and women in separate bedrooms, even though the design made these things very awkward. Even in condominiums they still sometimes build a welcoming fire in the apartment before setting foot inside.\n\n \nSoo then we spent a few days at a fancy hotel--the point being to let us get used to the culture and get over the jet lag. There is a little band and a boy in traditional dress who greet visitors and pose for pictures when you first show up. I balked again at the idea of them parading their culture around in front of us like that, but if it were the states and some kid were singing the national anthemin a cowboy suit, I probably wouldn\'t be too upset about it. That probably isn\'t a very good comparison, but a valid one to apply. If some waiter looked down my shirt when he bussed my plate in the states, I would probably just roll my eyes instead of spouting off some rinky-dink cultural analysis.\n\n \nWe visited a rural development NGO and some of their successful water-harvesting structures. Village life reminded me a lot of the way things were in Mexico, but in this particular place the women are very active and eager. A group of four or five women there were told about the idea of Self-Help Groups, and after stewing about it for awhile they decided to go for it. They had been frustrated that the men there wouldn\'t get their acts together about improving the irrigation system, so they got a labor-matching grant from the government--what the governmen gave in terms of capital, they would match in terms of labor (measured as every 10x1x1 foot hole they dug equalling about 70 rupees or a little over a dollar). What they do is they \n",1]
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Enter Tushti on roller skates. Exit Tushti on roller skates. She is excellent.

On the way out of Delhi we stopped at Gurgaon. This place is a flat plane with a number of enormous high-rise condominiums sprouting out of the ground next to slums thrown together for the people that construct them. We listened to a lecture on Indian architectural design, and in particular medeival architecture. There are forts scattered throughout Rajasthan--the medeival history is as alive here as it is in Europe. Some food for thought: Indian architecture tends to go from the center outward--traditionally, they would find the center of the courtyard, and build going outward from there. Western design principles generally dictate that one defines the border and builds inward from there. When colonial-style bungalows came along, Indian families still slept outside on the lawn and kept men and women in separate bedrooms, even though the design made these things very awkward. Even in condominiums they still sometimes build a welcoming fire in the apartment before setting foot inside.

Soo then we spent a few days at a fancy hotel--the point being to let us get used to the culture and get over the jet lag. There is a little band and a boy in traditional dress who greet visitors and pose for pictures when you first show up. I balked again at the idea of them parading their culture around in front of us like that, but if it were the states and some kid were singing the national anthemin a cowboy suit, I probably wouldn't be too upset about it. That probably isn't a very good comparison, but a valid one to apply. If some waiter looked down my shirt when he bussed my plate in the states, I would probably just roll my eyes instead of spouting off some rinky-dink cultural analysis.

We visited a rural development NGO and some of their successful water-harvesting structures. Village life reminded me a lot of the way things were in Mexico, but in this particular place the women are very active and eager. A group of four or five women there were told about the idea of Self-Help Groups, and after stewing about it for awhile they decided to go for it. They had been frustrated that the men there wouldn't get their acts together about improving the irrigation system, so they got a labor-matching grant from the government--what the governmen gave in terms of capital, they would match in terms of labor (measured as every 10x1x1 foot hole they dug equalling about 70 rupees or a little over a dollar). Actually, I thought this was so interesting I could write pages, and I think I'll make a separate post about it. The more interesting part of the story was that once the village started togenerate a little bit of extra income someone came and set up a small liquor shop on the edge of a bluff close by. The women got so frustrated with their husbands for coming home drunk that they went in the middle of the night and pushed the whole shack over the cliff. They wanted to hear a song, so we did a rousing rendition of "You are my Sunshine" and they returned the favor with a dance--they were such goofballs, it was great.

I guess I haven't gotten to anything of substance or even anything about hte past week, but that's alright, maybe I'll catch up soon.

2006-09-03T00:03:00.000-07:00

I am far too sentimental for this jet-set lifestyle. I am always getting all sniffly and snotty on airplanes and I never fail to make the passengers next to me mildly uncomfortable in one way or another. I’ll miss everyone. Man, I am so fortunate to have a good excuse to get to know a new place. I would feel pretty uneasy as a tourist and would probably have innumerable philosophical issues with working or volunteering in India. It’s absolutely insane that college students are afforded the opportunity to just go somewhere with no responsibilities beyond letting the whole thing wash over them. And holy crap, I’m still of the age that I’m actually expected to still be figuring things out—I imagine I’ll be floating around in an existential funk for awhile after college, maybe indefinitely, but shucks, I’m grateful that I still happen to be in a place where existential funk (or good ol’ EF, for short) is not only acceptable but expected and dare I say encouraged. Hot diggity damn. Recently I went to a psychedelic folk show in DC and ended up playing guitar on the curb until 4 in the morning…wandered around Lake Roland with snowballs, had a thought-provoking coffee date with my sage-like old neighbor, attended the legal lesbian wedding of the beloved director and co-director of Opequon Quaker Camp , went for some good long runs, had a big fat steak with my parents (I can feel my dumb moral compass pointing me towards vegetarianism again, someday soon) and ended with the traditional Lounge On The Couch. I’ve had considerable time to contemplate identity and love and the like... Good stuff, all of it. Is that what you’re supposed to write in a journal? The conclusions I come to are probably nothing new, and might seem pretty trite. Actually, if I’m worried about seeming trite I definitely should not have a blog. Hell, I probably shouldn’t even exist if that’s a genuine concern. Trite-land, here I come!

2006-09-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

I figured out that in order to see what I've written beyond this page, you have to click "archive," but I don't know why.

I thought a photo of my dog wearing a stupid hat would be the perfect beginning, but Jake seems to disagree. Here is a picture of my dog not wearing the hat that I want him to wear.