tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15969712706494916942024-03-13T08:35:55.216-07:00Claire On The MoveClaire's travel blog, cause you asked for it.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.comBlogger183125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-87706823207738351192015-07-28T07:00:00.001-07:002015-07-28T07:01:05.726-07:00Travel of a different sort<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the past more-than-a-year, I have moved a lot...mostly away from things. It reminds me of a conversation I had with J, at the end of our marriage, when he shouted at me that he thought I was always running away from things -- although I think he was wrong, since most of my life has been spent moving TOWARDS things.<br />
<br />
I moved away from Montreal, and my concept of home here. When I lived here in 2012-2014, I was pretty broke and pretty flexible. I had a cheap apartment that was in relatively good repair and close to two metro lines, a great housemate, and the freedom to travel whenever I could afford it. Turns out, when your rent is only $350 a month, you can go a lot more places than if your rent is more than that.<br />
<br />
So I left Montreal and I was sad about it, especially because Vancouver seemed so...heartless. Not in a cold way, although it did remind us of the Seattle Freeze, but in that it seemed to have no central pulsing soul. There were some mountains (beautiful!) and some ocean (also beautiful!) and we went for long walks down by the water and talked about how it would be nice to have some more friends someday, and about Erik's work and the way it seemed to have turned sour. It turned so sour that we had to leave, again -- we left and went back to Montreal, and I learned you can't go home again.<br />
<br />
Montreal between 2012 and 2014 was the closest I came to feeling like I had identified a home...but coming back to it, I am a different person, and it is no longer my home. Montreal is a great place to live when you're broke...but as a more adult person, in need of an adult apartment (with, you know, functional wiring and no holes in the walls where babies could stick things and also stairs that are not dangerous or precipitous and also no mold or floor tiles coming up or broken glass or a doorknob that only works by pulling a string from the upstairs hallway or walls that go all the way to the ceiling or no enormous slant to the floors or foundational cracks in the walls) in a relatively nice area, and earning an actual adult income? Montreal SUCKS. It is a pile of expensive bureaucracy. We have been deemed to be making a ton of money, so of course we pay large sums of it back to Quebec in taxes. We get some subsidies for childcare and so on...which are then taxed. Basically just...expensive, difficult, frustrating. This is not to mention the language politics constantly infringing on our lives (for example, you would think that, when English is 50% of the official languages of the country wherein your cafe is located, and the cafe is also located inside a building rented entirely by a company whose official language is English, taking a stand against the English language by refusing to allow the employees of your cafe to speak it to their customers might be ridiculous).<br />
<br />
So Montreal isn't really home anymore. It's okay. But E feels intensely uncomfortable here and doesn't want to stay -- and even if he did, the way Quebec politics are set up for permanent residency, we can't stay, because he doesn't speak enough French. So we have to leave Quebec sometime in the next few years anyway. No sense getting too settled, since this can't be our home. In some ways, I wondered why I bothered to paint the walls of our house, since we'd probably be leaving anyway? But I hear this is what makes one more adult, and honestly, a more effective traveler: nesting wherever you are, making home from pieces, again and again.<br />
<br />
I also found myself moving so far away from my idea of who I was, this year -- almost-year, as baby is now almost 9.5 months old. I thought of myself as an activist, an outgoing friendly person who liked to talk to people, someone who is creative and crafty, enjoys going to interesting events. Now, I find myself almost a recluse -- even when I can manage to go out to something, I feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable, and if the baby is there, my attention revolves around her needs. If the baby isn't there, I sometimes don't know what to do with myself. I don't do much activism right now...I don't do many crafts. Sometimes I think it's just sleep deprivation interfering with my ability to connect with my interests, and sometimes I think maybe it is some kind of postpartum depression and sometimes I think no, this is just what this is like for now. This is probably temporary, like all things with children. One day they sleep, the next day, not. One day I have no interests, and the next day, I once again find myself bookbinding, writing, sewing, traveling the 45 minutes by metro to work in the art hive.<br />
<br />
I also am redefining my yoga practice, which dropped off precipitously in the last few months of my pregnancy and has really never recovered. For years I had a regular daily yoga practice, and then I got too large to enjoy it and so I stopped. And then for the first few months after baby was born, the idea of doing anything other than watching TV on the couch underneath this tiny helpless person was anathema. And then I found myself uncertain, tentative -- the way I feel about talking to people: it seems like a good idea to do, but then when I actually do it, I don't find the joy in it that I used to.<br />
<br />
I think I need to ground myself into regular practices: find daily routines, make a point of making something, doing something, stretching my body, every day. Put the baby on my back and go, go, go...to somewhere. To myself, maybe, wherever that may be.</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-43538553005025193342014-05-04T18:39:00.003-07:002014-05-04T18:39:39.490-07:00Closing my accounts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VDtnIPTLsds/U2bk2jhe-ZI/AAAAAAAAA2s/kcc2a2yNII0/s1600/1398794090918.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VDtnIPTLsds/U2bk2jhe-ZI/AAAAAAAAA2s/kcc2a2yNII0/s1600/1398794090918.jpg" height="320" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Crazy beautiful graffiti in Montreal</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Almost a full year since the last time I updated, which is not to say the travel stopped. Nope, where did I go after July 29, 2013?<br />
<br />
I spent August, 2013 helping my mother complete her move to Prince Edward Island. Tiny red-dirt homeland, she finally bought the house she wanted and we shifted her stuff cross country and settled her into a place right behind where the Seatreat Restaurant used to be (for anyone who keeps track of Island locational methodologies..."that's where <that thing=""> USED to be"is a common direction, and woe betide anyone who hasn't lived on the Island for twenty years). I volunteered for Art in the Open and saw Monica and Betty Jo's fantastic art projects: a dilapidated house in the woods, a set of teacups. Someone else brought a field of lit balloons under the stars of the waterfront...someone else led me in a commitment ceremony to my understanding of impermanence. It was a mini-Burning Man, before...</that><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1tWlqqi_1FU/U2biOJHe3kI/AAAAAAAAA2U/fM7XiolcOkE/s1600/1208573_10151544559946199_1077397540_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1tWlqqi_1FU/U2biOJHe3kI/AAAAAAAAA2U/fM7XiolcOkE/s1600/1208573_10151544559946199_1077397540_n.jpg" height="320" width="319" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Beardy Erik, on our first official date</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
At the end of August, I went to Burning Man. On... Thursday? Of Burning Man, a bald man with a beard driving a mo'ai art car called my name through a megaphone and I started a whole new kind of trip that I had no idea I was starting. More on that in a bit.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of September, I stayed in San Francisco a few days (previously mentioned bald man may have played a role in this) and then flew back to Montreal. Shortly after my arrival, Ray turned up...then Zach.<br />
<br />
A few days after Zach left, I flew back to PEI to present a poster at the Canadian Sex Researcher's Conference. That first weekend in October is a gorgeous time to be on the Island, in case you're wondering. The tourists are mostly gone and the trees are sharp and beautiful, and it was certainly weird being there at almost exactly the time that I was when Anthony first made his appearance a year earlier. Now he only shows up in my thoughts as a bad example, but it was surreal having no feelings left about him whatsoever. Time heals all wounds something something.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LaomilIm3VY/U2bjpIji24I/AAAAAAAAA2g/WqX_wMt9O2o/s1600/IMG_20140113_130218.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LaomilIm3VY/U2bjpIji24I/AAAAAAAAA2g/WqX_wMt9O2o/s1600/IMG_20140113_130218.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>When I was in SF, I went to Arlette's</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Days after I got back, I flew to San Francisco. That bald guy, again.<br />
<br />
A few days after getting back, my lovely wife joined me in Montreal...then my friend Dustin, on his way to Jordan to go hiking with his dad. Then I went to Toronto to see Sky again. This is into October still.<br />
<br />
November, I spent the first weekend and part of the second week in New York City with Marcus, walking across Manhattan about sixteen times, visiting Kazuki, and playing would-you-rather over obnoxiously large pizza slices in the Village. Two days after coming back, I flew back to SF. Bald guy really seems to be having an impact.<br />
<br />
December was lowkey: a trip to Toronto early in the month, and a trip to PIttsburgh for New Year's, a week of visiting old friends and new, kissing the bald guy at midnight, and making some promises we intend to spend this year fulfilling.<br />
<br />
I spent most of January in SF, except for the weekend we drove to LA. The second weekend in February was a trip to Kitchener/Waterloo, and weeks later, bald guy showed up on my doorstep. In March, first I went to Toronto, then to Charlottetown for a week. Then I miraculously didn't go anywhere until the first week of April, when I went to Toronto. Then Vancouver for about 5 days.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a7alOlyqlAs/U2a5fl18CoI/AAAAAAAAA2E/-n7FvcrnLoQ/s1600/aejaibdb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a7alOlyqlAs/U2a5fl18CoI/AAAAAAAAA2E/-n7FvcrnLoQ/s1600/aejaibdb.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>New project!</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Now I'm back in Montreal, preparing for the next trip: Sweden, then Kill Devil Hills, NC...then Vancouver. Bald guy and I started a whole different kind of trip. That one both already started and will be starting in October.<br />
<br />
So the weird thing about saying goodbye to Montreal as I prepare to move to Vancouver with Erik and an extra third of a person, is wrapping up all of my ties to different communities and groups. Friends have already traded contact details or outlined the need to pay a trip to Vancouver. But some people will never know where I went and probably won't remember me, like the guy who's always behind the counter at the little Arabic grocery store I go to like every three days because I'm always forgetting to buy bread or another bag of unsweetened dried mangoes (how many bags of those do you need? Turns out, a lot). Other people -- like my regular meditation group or the other students in my twice-weekly yoga classes -- will probably sort of remember that I was there fondly but never really make an effort to find out where I am or what happened to me. "Remember Claire with the pink hair?" Ingrid from yoga who gives me all her cool pants might say. "I wonder what the heck ever happened to her?"<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PMJ4IfiZtmc/U2bqURbzuGI/AAAAAAAAA3E/ObrjDZd3p4Y/s1600/IMG_20140316_161420.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PMJ4IfiZtmc/U2bqURbzuGI/AAAAAAAAA3E/ObrjDZd3p4Y/s1600/IMG_20140316_161420.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Good point</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But all these tiny communities: the meditation group, the yoga class...the community art space and the vegan commune in the old church rectory and my friend Chris's band and the places I do regular figure modeling. I've been slowly taking my leave of them, giving hugs and saying goodbyes and just gently realizing I probably won't see most of these Facebook friends again.<br />
<br />
For some reason, leaving Montreal seems more permanent than leaving Australia did. For example, I still seem to have it in my head that I will definitely see my Australian friends again, even though that is significantly more unlikely than visiting friends who live RIGHT HERE in the same country. The mind is weird. But despite not having lived here for very long, Montreal feels pretty home-like to me, so it's weird to be deliberately leaving the place. Even if it does have some truly weird issues about mafia corruption and language stuff. But I find those endearing, at least until a chunk of concrete overpass crushes my skull and the bureaucrats shrug in typical Quebecois fashion and say "Whoops!"<br />
<br />
As if wanting to make me less sad about leaving, though, I received a series of requests from Revenu Quebec for copies of my Quebec provincial taxes from 2012. Which I did not file, because I moved to Quebec on December 11, 2012, and did not earn any money in the remaining 20 days of the taxable year. Which I explained to Revenu Quebec, but they were uninterested, preferring instead to believe that I did not understand what they wanted due to my poor French skills. Ah, Quebec.</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-43737277294170700322013-07-29T07:34:00.001-07:002013-07-29T07:34:42.283-07:00Bad trips...like, whoa, man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
After my whirlwind trip to San Francisco with my wife Sky, a trip that would have gone down in infamy as one of the worst trips I have ever taken if I had not had several other really terrible travel experiences recently, I thought I would list my top worst travel experiences.<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>Returning from Thailand in June 2012. I had a cheap one-way ticket on Air India from Bangkok to Toronto, with one stopover in New Delhi. While the plane was aloft, Air India went on strike, and we landed in New Delhi to discover that all onward planes had been cancelled. A harried-looking man took away all our passports and bundled them together with a rubber band and then put us onto a shuttle bus that took us to a building that could either have been an enormous hotel past its prime or a moldering mental institution, where we would wait for about 14 hours until they could find another plane to take us...somewhere. When we got to the airport, I discovered my trip home would now take me through Paris (where we all had to get off the plane, go back through security, and then get back on the plane...in 45 minutes) and New York before finally arriving in Toronto. The trip that was supposed to take 22 hours actually ended up taking 40+, although the food on Air India is delicious and I made friends with the only other person also going to Toronto: a professional deep sea diver that Air India apparently thought was my husband, because they kept seating us next to each other.</li>
<li>Train from Fes to Marrakech in May 2013. Seven hour train ride. Five of those hours spent with an earsplitting high-pitched feedback noise emitting from the train's PA system. You could watch everybody's face contort after the first half hour on the train. The only way I made it through was with earplugs.</li>
<li>Toronto to San Francisco, July 2013. Yeah, it makes it in there, for sure. We took the Greyhound to Buffalo -- Greyhound's website estimates it will take 3 hours, but the bus driver told us that was completely wrong; it always takes longer. This time it took even longer: we got stuck in stop-and-go traffic for an extra hour, meaning we arrived at the Buffalo airport 20 minutes before our plane was supposed to depart. We sprinted to the gate...only to discover that our plane hadn't left Baltimore, and would be leaving for Chicago two hours late. This meant we'd miss our connector to Oakland, but when we tried to rebook the tickets, the very nice lady at customer service said rebooking was impossible as her system showed that our flight to Oakland was delayed and we would be able to make it. In the air on the way to Chicago, the flight attendant reassured us that we had definitely missed our flight to Oakland...but there was a flight going to SFO leaving 20 minutes after we were set to touch down and it had three standby seats left. The minute we hit the tarmac, I called Southwest and they reissued boarding passes for the SFO flight, and Sky and I sprinted to the new gate. After a $100 taxi ride from SFO to where we were staying in Oakland, a) Southwest lost Sky's bag and wouldn't tell her where it was for three days, and b) BART went on strike for the first time in 17 years. Also when I got home, I discovered my cell phone provider charged me $1.50 a minute in international roaming fees for all the frantic calls we'd made to Southwest trying to rebook tickets. Air travel in the U.S.: it's the gift that keeps on giving.</li>
<li>I do not remember the details perfectly, but I do remember being 12 years old and in Europe with my mom, and a flight cancellation or delay resulted in our being stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport for an extra ten hours worth of layover. I am sure that travelling with a pre-pubescent dork could not have been fun for my mom, and I was bored out of my skull. To this day, I have a strange aversion to CDG.</li>
<li>Guatemala, 2008. My friend Colleen and I, certain we knew what we were doing, were baffled by the lack of direct service from Panajachel to Tikal -- all the buses went back south several hours and had a layover in Guatemala City. So we decided to travel the way the locals do: on increasingly tinier minibuses, heading into increasingly more dangerous road. Eventually we wound our way along a road that was unfinished; deserted construction equipment nestled against the edge of the mountain on one side, and our tires slipped along the gravel road as we peered out the side window down the sheer drop that did not seem to faze the driver. We had a full load, including some people sitting on other people's laps, and I was wedged so tightly between Colleen and the guy sitting next to me, it was hard to raise my arms to cover my eyes when the tires occasionally ran off the road. Then it started to get dark. And rain. We got there eventually, but it took a very long time and probably several years off my lifespan.</li>
<li>Cozumel, 2006? I don't remember exactly when this was, but in an effort to bolster my dying marriage, I booked a 6-day package holiday to Cozumel, with the reasoning that, hey, I'd never been on a package tour before. Our flight from Pittsburgh to Houston was delayed...and delayed...and further delayed by a mechanical error which turned out to be a problem with the windshield wipers. So we left super late and couldn't make up any time en route...which meant we were left with 15 minutes to make it from the domestic to the international terminal in Houston. I honestly have never run so fast in my life. We made it to the jetway with literally three minutes to spare, and the flight attendants applauded when they saw us bolting for the gate. When we got on board, there were people sitting in our seats and while we stood there waiting for them to move, I almost keeled over sideways into the aisle. It took about half an hour for my heart to stop pounding. CARDIO.</li>
<li>Somewhere along the highway in New York, 2006 or 2007. We were driving back to Pittsburgh from Ontario in the winter, and as everybody who knows the nexus of bad weather that is Buffalo can attest, Buffalo is an infernal hellhole of lake effect precipitation. It snowed harder and visibility got worse as we got past the border...to find that the freeway south had been closed. And all the hotels in the area were booked solid by people who were smarter than we were. "But the Red Cross shelter still has some space," the toll lady said. We elected instead to push on through the snow, until we were the only vehicle on the small road except for monstrous snowplows and ice trucks, passing us like leviathans in the Marianis trench...with just about as much visibility. Still, Jeff was used to driving in Minnesota, and we felt like we were winning against the weather gods as we edged closer and closer to Pittsburgh, certain the lake effect snow would stop once we got far enough from Buffalo. Instead, we hit a patch of black ice, spun out into a snowdrift at an exit ramp and totalled the car. We were all fine, but had to walk up to the toll booth at the end of the exit ramp and wait there while they called a tow truck, which were working overtime from all the accidents. We waited for two hours when a tow truck driver arrived and drove us to the closest hotel he knew of that might have a vacancy. It did. We collapsed into the one small bed and the next morning called a friend in Pittsburgh to drive up and pick us up. The car was a write-off.</li>
</ol>
I am sure there are more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. I've had surprisingly good luck, given all the travel I do -- let's hope I never have anything worse to add to the list, like my old acquaintance Jessamyn, who was once in a bus in India that rolled off a cliff and she staggered out of it covered in blood that wasn't hers.</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-1666922993077628982013-07-11T11:02:00.002-07:002013-07-11T11:02:20.267-07:00Crawled from the Internet Archive<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I LOVED this post from meish.org, which is now, sadly, gone...so I crawled it from the Wayback Machine via the Internet Archive. By Meg Pickard.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="text"><span class="tiny"></span></span><br />
<h1>
<span class="text"><span class="tiny">So, Glastonbury festival is off</span></span></h1>
<span class="text"><span class="tiny">
So, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20031103111348/http://www.nme.com/NME/External/News/News_Story/0,1004,12271,00.html">Glastonbury festival</a>
is off this year. Well, not to worry. Just because Michael Eavis (the
man with an upside-down head) isn't going to oblige, doesn't mean you
have to miss out on all the fun. Just follow my handy tips below, and
with the help of a very obliging friend, you can be well on your way to
recreating the Glastonbury experience in the comfort of your own
home....<br />
<ol><br />
<li>Duck out of work early on a thursday, and then go and sit in your
car for seven hours. Don't go anywhere, just sit there. If you have
heating, even better: whack it up to full.<br />
</li>
<li>When it gets dark and you're nice and sweaty, go around to the
back of your house and enter by vaulting over a hedge/climbing in the
windows/shinning up the drainpipe. This will be your method of entry and
exit to the house for the next four days.<br />
</li>
<li>Arrange in advance to have a friend distribute your furniture,
posessions and various random bits of taut string around the house in
your absence. Also, tell them to remove all your lightbulbs. Upon
entering your home, stumble around blindly for an hour or so before you
find your bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Insert four or five large rocks under your matress.<br />
</li>
<li>Take an aspirin.<br />
</li>
<li>Wait for nothing to happen.<br />
</li>
<li>Go to bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Arrange for a friend to wake you up by pissing on your duvet.<br />
</li>
<li>Eat a mars bar for breakfast.<br />
</li>
<li>Go and stand outside your toilet for an hour and a half.<br />
</li>
<li>Use toilet (not paper)<br />
</li>
<li>Arrange for your friend to stand at the bottom of the garden
holding up a CD jewel case of a band you aren't really that keen on. <br />
</li>
<li>For true authenticity, arrange for another friend to stand directly in front of you and shout.<br />
</li>
<li>Put the radio on very quietly. Keep this up for six or seven hours.<br />
</li>
<li>Queue up beside your kitchen cupboard for two hours.<br />
</li>
<li>Pay £4.50 for an authentic Thai meal (pot noodle)<br />
</li>
<li>Take an aspirin.<br />
</li>
<li>Wait for nothing to happen.<br />
</li>
<li>Arrange for your friend to accost you naked on the stairs and jabber wildly at you for an hour.<br />
</li>
<li>Stand outside your toilet for an hour.<br />
</li>
<li>Give up, go into the garden and pee under a bush.<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat steps 12-14.<br />
</li>
<li>Throw £15 into your neighbour's garden. Roll up some bay leaves and sage in a rizla. Light. Choke. Repeat.<br />
</li>
<li>Take an aspirin.<br />
</li>
<li>Wait for nothing to happen.<br />
</li>
<li>Go to bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Discover that someone (possibly your obliging friend) has pissed on your bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Sleep fitfully while your friend plays bongos two feet from your head and shouts "Oi-OI!" every ten minutes.<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat steps 8-15<br />
</li>
<li>Pay £8.20 for an authentic organic Mexican Veggie burger (8 Linda McCartney Spicy Beanburgers, 99p from Tesco)<br />
</li>
<li>Take an aspirin<br />
</li>
<li>Wait for nothing to happen.<br />
</li>
<li>Become amazed when you actually do start to feel a tingle in your toes.<br />
</li>
<li>Neck half a bottle of White Lightening Extra Fearsome Cider. <br />
</li>
<li>Find a puddle.<br />
</li>
<li>Dance in it for twelve minutes, even though you can't hear any music from where you are.<br />
</li>
<li>Find a bush.<br />
</li>
<li>Throw up in it.<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat steps 19-23.<br />
</li>
<li>Watch your friend (or other random person) to twirl fire balls while wearing a silly jester's hat and no shirt.<br />
</li>
<li>Say "wow"<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat any of the above steps.<br />
</li>
<li>Go to bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Discover that someone (probably you) has thrown up on your bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Sleep fitfully while your friend throws buckets of water at you, shouting "Glastonbuuuuuuuuuury!" every five minutes.<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat steps 8-15.<br />
</li>
<li>Pay £6.40 for a plate of chips.<br />
</li>
<li>Repeat steps 16-24.<br />
</li>
<li>Go to bed.<br />
</li>
<li>Discover that someone (probably your friend) has stolen your bed, your clothes, and, in fact, everything you own.<br />
</li>
<li>Climb down the drainpipe and over the fence, and sleep in your car.<br />
</li>
<li>Wake up uncomfortably and then sit in your car for nine hours, with the heater on full blast.<br />
</li>
<li>Go directly to work.</li>
</ol>
See? Nothing to it! The authentic festival experience in the (dis)comfort of your own home. Who needs Madonna anyway?</span></span></blockquote>
</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-89312160089528503792013-06-17T07:13:00.001-07:002013-06-17T07:13:55.653-07:00Is this the hell that this is?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My brain is kind of a jerk.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r_YmJXgpjqI/Ub8XBsTl3cI/AAAAAAAAAwI/LOwKyAFmVOA/s1600/P1010129.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r_YmJXgpjqI/Ub8XBsTl3cI/AAAAAAAAAwI/LOwKyAFmVOA/s320/P1010129.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This is what it felt like inside my brain. Too many languages.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
After spending almost six months cramming it full of French, trying to revive my high school grammar so I can successfully use the subjunctive and don't just sound like I'm either terminally shy or inarticulate while living in Montreal, I decided to take it to Spain. I don't really speak Spanish. I never studied it, in school or elsewhere, and the last time I went to a Spanish-speaking country, my friend Colleen and I were very proud of ourselves that we understood our tour guide when he spoke in the equivalent of kindergarten-Spanish. "THIS...IS...A...VOLCANO," he would say to us, very very slowly. We'd nod our heads, then he would light his walking stick on fire. We couldn't ask why, so we just applauded.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xOUz1D4h0v8/Ub8Xgw_kNnI/AAAAAAAAAwU/XqAMBU5qun4/s1600/P1010149.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xOUz1D4h0v8/Ub8Xgw_kNnI/AAAAAAAAAwU/XqAMBU5qun4/s320/P1010149.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Obligatory photo of the Sagrada Famiglia.</i></td></tr>
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<br />
However, apparently, what I *do* speak is Italian. I spent 3 months in Italy when I was 16 years old, and haven't spoken Italian since then. I was actually in the northern part of Italy, in the Dolomiti, the gorgeous rocky mountains famous for being home to Italy's Ladino population, who are famous for not speaking Italian. So I went to Italy and stayed for three months with people who don't speak Italian, and yet somehow managed to pick up enough Italian that my mind very cheerfully said "ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T MEAN MOLTO BENE INSTEAD OF MUY BIEN?" every time I tried to communicate in Spanish. Basically, I spent my entire time in Spain with my brain throwing out exciting phrases in four languages at once: Spanish, Italian, French, and English. Sometimes I also got some German, which I have also never studied.<br />
<br />
Then we went to Morocco, and fortunately, I have forgotten almost all of my vocabulary from my university Arabic classes, so I could be left in relative comfort to speak either English or French. I did spend a few hours on the train to Fes writing out the Arabic alphabet to see if I could remember it (yep, all 4 H's still accounted-for) and my journal is full of little frantically-scrawled notes of "What the hell is the stupid "th" anyway?" (hint: depends on if you mean the soft th or the hard th). So in Morocco, I could read the signs, but not decipher what they meant. Fair enough.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6JdooMJ1fw0/Ub8XsrNyt9I/AAAAAAAAAwc/nF_ym6HZ4ok/s1600/P1010351.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6JdooMJ1fw0/Ub8XsrNyt9I/AAAAAAAAAwc/nF_ym6HZ4ok/s320/P1010351.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>One of the only words I know in Arabic: mdrsa (school)</i></td></tr>
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<br />
So Ray and I went to Spain and Morocco. We realized after the trip was over that we had somehow managed to stay in literally every possible sort of residence while we were there. In Barcelona, we stayed with Ray's friends Rob and Aleta, who had recently moved from San Luis Obispo and had almost no furniture in their gorgeous wood-floored Spanish apartment. We sat on the floor around cardboard boxes and they drank wine while I read aloud from the past winners of the Ig Nobel prizes...as you do. In Sevilla, we stayed in our first AirBNB room, a tiny brightly-colored place in Triana, across the river from Sevilla proper and with a lot more character and fewer tourists. Our one night in Tangier was spent in a typical ratbag Moroccan pension, where the beds have been compressed to the density of walnuts by years of people sleeping on them and never having their sheets changed. This pension was right next to the Grand Mosque, which made the middle-of-the-night call to prayer somewhat noisy. It seemed to go on for quite some time, too, after which Ray muttered, "I knew they were doing a call to prayer, but I didn't think they'd be doing the whole service!"<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SA369YRXsIc/Ub8YXb-QnhI/AAAAAAAAAw0/Lj_zkEM8oIQ/s1600/P1010430.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SA369YRXsIc/Ub8YXb-QnhI/AAAAAAAAAw0/Lj_zkEM8oIQ/s320/P1010430.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Medina in Fes</i></td></tr>
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In Fes, we stayed in a riad: a super-fancy, super-swanky old-style Moroccan hotel with a central courtyard, elaborately-painted wood ornamentation, zellij tiles, and two extremely friendly Moroccan concierges. We were right around the corner from a hammam, where I ended up drastically overpaying to have a tiny elderly women scrub all the dry skin off my body and then force me to wear someone else's clean underwear back to the hotel. In Marrakech, we found ourselves in a generic mid-level hotel: clean sheets, hot water, and almost nothing else. Right off the Djema el-Fna, it was mostly just our launching point for getting the hell out of Marrakech. After our flight to Essaouria, we found ourselves in a hippie hostel next to the seawall; populated entirely by long-term traveling backpackers, we shared communal meals and someone played guitar and sang literally every night we were there. They had two pet ducks on the roof and encouraged guests to paint on the walls. A quick flight back to Madrid and we spent two nights in an artist's home (again via AirBNB) in Chueca, the gay quarter populated by cheerful Eastern European sex workers checking their phones in 6" heels and tight pants.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_hXg53bXaEw/Ub8YvHtUt_I/AAAAAAAAAw8/EQlwbnRIp3E/s1600/P1010474.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_hXg53bXaEw/Ub8YvHtUt_I/AAAAAAAAAw8/EQlwbnRIp3E/s320/P1010474.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hanging lantern in Green Milk dormitory</i></td></tr>
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<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-chOWgA3A0Wo/Ub8Y4XLmu6I/AAAAAAAAAxE/fAgph5FIxxI/s1600/P1010447.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-chOWgA3A0Wo/Ub8Y4XLmu6I/AAAAAAAAAxE/fAgph5FIxxI/s320/P1010447.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Seedlings at Green Milk...isn't Art Mode pretty?</i></td></tr>
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I don't have many Exciting Stories to tell about this trip, really. We saw a lot of Gaudi architecture, and were inspired to create mosaics. We ate a lot of amazing food. Rob and Aleta took us to their favorite restaurant in Barcelona (Bodega La Palma, mmmmm) where they know the waiter. We would order something, and he would bring us something else, saying, "You didn't want that other thing. You want this." A wheel of fresh raw cheese with homemade blackberry jam...he was right, we DID want that. When we ordered dessert, we got tiramisu and then asked him to recommend something. His brow furrowed and his face got serious, then he nodded and wrote something down; it turned out to be nougat ice cream doused with an anise liqueur, so good we almost cried. We staggered out into the street after that, moaning and holding our stomachs. It was worth it. On my birthday in Madrid, I had the best mushroom risotto I have ever had in my life, and some goat cheese and honey ravioli that I would have married if that sort of thing was legal.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QtbSSmTzxpM/Ub8ZLTs4YAI/AAAAAAAAAxM/9CZjuS5x92w/s1600/P5260638.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QtbSSmTzxpM/Ub8ZLTs4YAI/AAAAAAAAAxM/9CZjuS5x92w/s320/P5260638.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Our host's kitchen in Madrid: knives & dudes kissing</i></td></tr>
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<br />
In Morocco, we mostly just ate a lot of tagine and doughnuts. Food in Morocco is really only impressive and exciting if you can eat meat and you don't mind consuming your own weight in sugar. The mint tea, for example. I saw a woman make mint tea in her home in Rabat back in 1999; she took her tiny teapot and threw in a handful of tea leaves, then added a sheaf of mint. Then she went to the giant block of refined white sugar in the corner of the kitchen, took what looked like an ice pick and hacked off an enormous chunk, wedged it in the mouth of the teapot, and poured the boiling water over it so it slowly dissolved into the tea below. Mint tea ("Moroccan whiskey") is more like a decorative syrup than a tea.<br />
<br />
We spent a lot of time walking. We realized that one day in Sevilla, we walked nonstop for about ten hours. We needed something to do before the restaurants opened for dinner at 10pm, so we just walked and looked at things and talked and sat and ate lunch and walked some more. We found an Ai Wei Wei exhibit and looked at it. We found some cafes and sat in them and read books. Ray fell asleep in an armchair. We found parks and sat in those. We ate gelato. You may notice a theme in this trip. If you did not, let me point it out to you: walking. And eating. That's pretty much it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wCQ2y09pC48/Ub8ZVr292DI/AAAAAAAAAxU/xx1WIPsSJmE/s1600/P1010325.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wCQ2y09pC48/Ub8ZVr292DI/AAAAAAAAAxU/xx1WIPsSJmE/s320/P1010325.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ai Wei Wei: pretty.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
After I lost my phone in Sevilla, Ray let me use his camera. This turned out to be a mistake, because I decided my favorite setting was Art Mode, which produces gorgeously supersaturated photos with blown-out colors. The rest of the trip was mostly just us wrestling the camera away from each other and changing the settings back and forth. The photos mostly just look as though we went to two very different places: one looks sort of like Europe, and one looks like the inside of a Disney movie. Say what you will, I like contrast in my photos, god damnit.<br />
<br />
Overall, the trip was gorgeous: restful and calm, we spent a lot of time actually BEING ON VACATION, which is something I rarely do. I usually work or plan or develop skills or something, I rarely travel just for the sake of travelling. This was completely unplanned, except for roughly when we wanted to go where, and even that changed when we got to Marrakech and hated it. We kind of sort of knew what we wanted to do, but we played it thoroughly by ear. I haven't been to Spain or Morocco since 1999, so we also spent some time revisiting things I first saw when I was 19 years old, which means I was constantly saying things like "Wow! That's changed a lot!" And then eating a doughnut.</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-49487160272317927752013-06-08T13:47:00.004-07:002013-06-08T13:47:59.097-07:00From the archives: Hair Wild, Heart Wilder<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This is a chunk of diary from my trip to Morocco in 1999, when I met and was travelling with <a href="http://travelingclaire.blogspot.ca/2008/08/shatter-and-rebuild.html">Wolf</a>. Wolf with the curly hair and ice-blue eyes, Wolf who became so radically different when he drank that I didn't understand until years later that he was drunk and abusive, not just emotionally volatile...that I hadn't done something wrong, other than watch him down a bottle of Jack's alone on the beach in Cadiz.</i><br />
<i>But at the time I wrote this journal entry, it was June of 1999 and I was in love, so much in love that I was practically on fire. Not just in the loins region; in the heart, in the letters I wrote home. We'd fled Morocco to Spain briefly, once Wolf finally retrieved his second-time-lost passport. Desperate for cheese and not to be leered at, we wandered the rocky Andalucian coast, slept in a hostel with a green center courtyard in Sevilla, woke up late. But I decided I wanted to be in the Sahara for the last Summer Solstice of the millenium (yes, I know the last year of the millenium was actually 1999, but what were YOU doing in 1999?), and so we made the trek back to Morocco. And I wrote this.</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: serif;"><u>Hair
Wild, Heart Wilder</u></span></div>
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> A solid thirty-four
hours of travel: leaving Sevilla at 6:15 yesterday morning, and going
through Algeciras, Tangier, Meknes, and Rissouni finally got us here,
to the patio of Auberge Tuareg, looking at the amber dunes of the
Sahara desert behind the palm trees. They change color in the light,
so they are never the same twice.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> A young man in
Rissouni played his luggage cart as a drum...smiling brightly, and
with a wave to us, he pulled a puppy seemingly out of nowhere and
cradled it against him as he walked away. Desert people are
different people; the hassle in Rissouni was unbelievable, but still
somehow more acceptable than the hassle in Tangier.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> Why the rush, you
might ask? Well, because we wanted to be here in the desert for
today, the Solstice; the last summer Solstice of this Millenium, if
you want to let that whole 2000 vs. 2001 thing slide. It was
important to both of us, so important that Wolf told me not to
mention it when we were traveling, in case one of the touts tried to
rook us when he saw our desperation.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> The heat is like
riding into a blast furnace but it doesn't bother me as much as it
did before, although I did get dehydrated and sunburned my nose
(again). Now I've drunk about three two-liter bottles of water
("Said Ali" brand, meaning “Mr. Ali”). We saw the sun
rise from the bus—it was very huge and orange over the flat
horizon; the phoenix reborn from fire.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> Arriving in
Rissouni early early, we tried to get transport to the dunes
immediately—of course we got fourteen different stories ("Oh,
my friend will leave in an hour, his truck is right here" only
to wait and wait and see neither friend nor imminent departure) and
finally we just took the public bus at 2, and rode on the roof. A
friendly boy told us about it and so we stuck to him like glue, and
were rewarded with watching the dusty desert surround us. Other
trucks crowded with blinking tourists and wrapped-up desert folks
traveling from tiny village to tiny village would careen blindly past
us out of the dust every now and then, but mostly it was sand, and
tire tracks, and the hot, hot sun. Every now and then, a
sand-colored village that looked empty rose up before us. The
windows are cut in archways and the roofs have stepped decorations on
them; a flapping of blackness as the women descend carrying
vegetables or water or whatever it was they needed they couldn't get.
Amazing, to live here in a town that doesn't even have a name.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> The city/village of
Merzouga fades right into the desert like a second child ignored by a
vivacious older sibling. It’s an ugly town: grey-tan squat
buildings, all in squares, surrounded by white-bleached dirt,
everything bone-dry and glaring with the reflection of the sun.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> Sitting in a cafe
staring out the door at the dunes, they seem to glow. They change
color in minutes, so trying to remember them is hard. "I don't
like sudden changes," he said. Let the slow hot move of time
bury us until we're scuttled over by scorpions and beetles in the
immense desert silence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> The town is ugly,
yes, but you could never call it that to its face. The sky, like
everything else, is bleached white.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> We went to the
dunes yesterday night, with water bottles wrapped in our Moroccan
scarves, right before sunset. Night settled like a rock as we
scrabbled through the sand, aiming for the top of a particularly
largish dune. Halfway up, we laid out our clothes in the moonlight
to lie naked, side by side. Too cloudy to see many stars, and the
moon itself was covered soon, leaving us completely wrapped in
darkness.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> A windstorm blew
up, almost burying us in sand, but it wasn't frightening, only sandy.
We got dressed and made our way back along the dune ridge, heads
wrapped in scarves, hand in hand, Wolf leading the way. Along the
way, he conversationally mentioned that he was allergic to scorpions;
fortunately, we didn’t meet any.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> Back at the hotel,
the staff was playing drums and singing wild droning nasal music and
smoking kif. A boy who remembers Wolf from when he was here before
brought us a double mattress and pillows so we could sleep on the
terrace. Our shower that night was full of grains of sand, as though
it was pieces of our skin or our souls, washing off us and running
down the drain.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> A camel walked by
the arched doorway of our hotel, barely visible through another
storm, perfectly framed for an instant. Wolf ran for his camera, but
I only watched as it moved on like a princess: head high, thousands
of years of practice inbred to the very bone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> </span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> On the roof of our
auberge, he took me in his arms and was as tender as a new lover,
until I froze. "What is it?" he asked me. "The
owner's son," I said, and there he was, a little grinning man,
standing at the top of the stairs down to the main floor, clearly
ogling us as we lay there. Wolf only smiled, but I cringed at the
thought of him watching us; it would only have taken a few minutes
for him to gather a crowd and sell tickets. In his ardor, Wolf
dragged me across the roof, where the bricks are rough straw: there
is an abraded scratch down my spine from mid-back to hips, raw and
bleeding.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> I walked from the
shower to our room without a towel later, five feet and the door was
closed behind me, and his face was incredulous. "What were you
thinking?" he said. "Anyone could have seen you!" </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> </span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: serif;"> We went walking in
the Hammada, the black desert, which stretches all the way to
Algeria. Acres of volcanic rock dotted with the occasional tan
cluster of houses or tents, or brownish camel. It was so hot with
the sun above and the black desert below that I felt short of breath
and inhaled in gasps through the constant dust storms; there's no
sand in the Hammada, only rock, so the storms are of dust. It’s
the color of late sun, and it gets into everything; your hair, your
eyes, your clothes, your teeth.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> Leaning against a
wall at one point and looking up blinking as the storm receded, we
found ourselves surrounded by brightly dressed children and women,
staring and laughing. We inspected a herd of camels (their front
legs are tied up bent so they can't run away) and were invited by
numerous Berber children to shelter in their house for the next
storm. We picked one: mud walls, bamboo-type roof, sticks in the
walls holding clothing, about eight kids. Oceans of tea through
storm after storm. The old man, our host, mixed the tea seven times
for each serving, pouring it out and back into the pot. He gave us
dates, and his son ran out shouting into the storm; he was chasing
their camels, who had somehow broken free and were speedily heading
for the Algerian border on only three legs.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> When we got up to
go, the oldest girl blocked our path, demanding first 40 dh and then
100dh. We didn't have much with us, certainly not 100dh, and
mistaking filthy lucre for hospitality made us sad. We gave her what
we had and left, stopping once in another storm for me to pee behind
a dune.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> The call to prayer
starts. "No," he says, "I just love your body and
your mind and your spirit."</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: serif;"> You are a gift to
me, but I am worried: there is not a gift that exists that is not
more precious when it is given away. </span>
</div>
</div>
Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-64373006801043727792013-02-07T21:40:00.001-08:002013-02-07T21:40:36.006-08:00For today I am a robotSometimes, I am disoriented.<br />
<br />
I walked down St Hubert earlier, with Adam, the biting cold turning our faces red. My scarf was freezing to my upper lip as I breathed; my glasses kept fogging with a thin layer of ice as condensation from my exhalations froze and thawed, froze and thawed. But dizzily, I thought I was in Northbridge. My mind flashed, "We'll pass Gelare up here on the right, and then I can...no, wait..."<br />
<br />
Stepping into the metro the other day, I waited for the recorded voice message to say "Station Ploenchit" before realizing I wasn't in Bangkok. I woke up thinking about going to yoga class and, before I opened my eyes, found myself picturing Wild Rose's courtyard, pulling down the ramp on my no-speed bicycle and chaining it to the bamboo fence. I fell asleep a few nights ago wondering why I couldn't hear the Armadale train zipping past every few minutes, and caught myself thinking <i>They must be working on the tracks again.</i><br />
<br />
Part of it is reading "The Slap", a book written by a Greek-Australian that is so vivid in its descriptions of barbecue, driving around, the slang, the attitude, that I find myself shocked when I go outside and encounter the frozen unfamiliar landscape of Canada. I think it's just so different to me, given that I haven't lived here in so very long, that my mind is compensating by throwing up all these other places I've lived and loved, in an effort to make Montreal familiar.<br />
<br />
As I was walking towards Mont Royal earlier this evening, a flat of thirty local eggs from Jean Talon market wrapped in newspaper and rattling safely in my backpack, a man stopped me. "Excusez moi," he said, "ou est la station de metro?" <i>Where's the metro station?</i><br />
<br />
I pointed ahead of us. "C'est juste la-bas," I said. <i>It's right over there.</i><br />
<br />
At least I know where I am some of the time.<i> </i>Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-62365464196145142432013-01-07T08:31:00.002-08:002013-01-07T08:31:49.932-08:00New York and back againThe Adirondack Trailways bus from New York City to Montreal costs $84 and takes approximately 9 hours, unless you are unlucky and it is snowing through the mountains, or you have any dark-skinned people on your bus. It is a well-known and never overtly stated fact that over-land customs guards, particularly entering the United States from Canada, do not like you to be brown.<br />
<br />
It used to be that I was frequently "randomly selected" for "screening" at airports and US border crossings. Despite my dual citizenship and tidy booklet of passports, my bizarre outfits, spurious companions, and, at the time, inscrutable bags of musical instruments and bellydancing swords meant that I was probably a drug dealer. One customs agent tried to have a heart to heart with me (this was after Burning Man, to be fair, and I was driving across the US-Canada border near Vancouver, with pink hair, pounds of dust on my car, and a bumper sticker that said "It was on fire when I got here") and said, "Do you have any narcotics in the car? You can tell me if you do. It's better if you tell me than if I just find them." Does anyone actually fall for that?<br />
<br />
Naturally, after September 11, 2001, a slow steady bias against brown people crossing the border started up; my friend Jake said he once sat at the crossing to Vermont for 2.5 hours, while customs interrogated the dark-skinned Canadian citizen who had been born in Iran. Everyone has to get off the bus and go through screening and get back on, so the entire bus had to wait for this one guy. On my last trip to New York in November, with the Russian Mafia (don't ask), the one dark-skinned girl on the bus spent forty minutes trying to convince them that, yes, she was in a doctoral program to be a museum curator, and yes, that was a real job. They didn't believe her. They put a lookout on her file because they were convinced nobody could make a living being a curator. Probably accurate, but that's more a factor of how North America values art than a cover for a smuggling ring.<br />
<br />
So this time, I was hanging around outside the customs stop, breathing the fresh air. The waiting room inside was full of Amish people and smelled like handmade sausages, and I'd been on the bus for about 7 hours. A young man with a tidy goatee came out and lit a cigarette. "Did they ask you a lot of weird questions?" he said.<br />
<br />
They hadn't. For some reason, customs is always very VERY interested in my interpersonal relationships. In November, they asked me why I was going to New York. "To visit a friend." You have friends in New York? "Yes." Why are you coming from Montreal when your residential address is in Ontario? "I have friends there too." You have a lot of friends, don't you? "I guess so?" This time, I just got: Why were you in New York? "To visit friends." Do you visit them a lot? "Whenever I can?" It's nice of customs to be so concerned with how often I see my social circle and what I do while I'm there. Maybe they just wanted to be invited the next time we go for dim sum. Or I could have taken them to a museum and shown them what a curator was.<br />
<br />
But goatee guy was olive-skinned, and I said, "What kind of questions did they ask you?"<br />
<br />
Turns out he was Jordanian, but living in New York to get a degree in Communications at Columbia. He was obviously from a rich family -- his mother bought him the fanciest new Samsung phone for Christmas, and bought his sister a Blackberry and a jacket from Barney's. How do I know all this? He told me EVERYTHING. Chain smoking furiously, he sighed and said, "I'm really glad they didn't search me. I have a prescription bottle full of different kinds of Xanax. I already took 80mg so I could sleep on the bus." He took another puff on his cigarette. "I don't think I should do any coke tonight, after that much Xanax. I just have this crazy high tolerance, you know?"<br />
<br />
"Maybe because you take so much of it?" I pointed out gently. He grinned.<br />
<br />
We had a lively conversation, so much so that he sat next to me on the bus when it reloaded. He told me about his copious drug use, his heavy drinking, his mother's recent 2-month visit in his one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment (another clue that he's rich). He said he'd woken his roommate up at 5am the previous night crying because he was convinced he was fat and therefore couldn't go to Montreal. <br />
<br />
"I would have killed you," I said.<br />
<br />
"I knoooooow," he squealed.<br />
<br />
On the bus, he told me about his recent HIV test (negative), and the sex education he'd received afterwards, which he was very happy about. "Did you know you shouldn't use two condoms at once?" he said, entranced. "I always do that! Not anymore! Also you're not supposed to use Vaseline for lube! That's the only thing I use!" He had a cheerful tone and pitch to his voice which I wouldn't have minded, if all the Amish people had not gotten onto our bus. Directly in front of us was a young Amish couple. The woman was holding a baby. Guaranteed they could hear our discussion of anal lubricant. I didn't even bother trying to shush my new friend.<br />
<br />
"Just get some of that silicone stuff," I advised him. "Use a lot and you'll be fine."<br />
<br />
He told me a bit about his love life, how he was tired of being the downlow guy for every straight man who wanted to explore his sexuality. He told me about his blind date from OKCupid, who turned out to be so boring that Jordanian guy put a Xanax in his own drink at the bar, and the date became convinced he was about to be date-raped and left. He Skyped his friend from Montreal on the spotty bus wifi. He was a bundle of energy for someone who'd just taken 80mg of Xanax.<br />
<br />
When we got to the Gare de l'Autobus, he unloaded his bags and bags of stuff, wrapped his scarf around his head, tidied his stuff. I gave him a hug. "Good luck," I said. "I hope I don't find you passed out in a dumpster tomorrow morning."<br />
<br />
He smiled. "That wouldn't be so bad," he said.<br />
<br />
Some people don't like the bus. If you have the time to spare and the proper attitude, you get the best experiences.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-17327954090343887882012-12-31T14:42:00.002-08:002012-12-31T14:42:22.691-08:00Fast away the old year passes<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wXNJmwPfpEI/UOISXntZmEI/AAAAAAAAAu0/HSQnvpsPFog/s1600/IMG_20121227_155158.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wXNJmwPfpEI/UOISXntZmEI/AAAAAAAAAu0/HSQnvpsPFog/s320/IMG_20121227_155158.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Out the front window of my apartment December 27</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
December marks a month of change for me; instead of following my usual nomadic lifestyle of the past five years, I rented an apartment in one of the worst places on earth to rent an apartment in the winter. Sixteen days after I moved in, we got a record snowfall for Montreal (50cm in one day), and when I left Montreal for New York City, where I currently am, the sidewalk outside my apartment had still not been plowed, meaning you had to plunge through thigh-deep snow just to get to my stairs. The day it snowed (I feel that should be all capitalized: The Day It Snowed), I went to my friend Chris' house to visit and stayed for a few hours; when I left, I missed the bottom step in the drifts and fell head first into a three-foot pile of snow. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HNyBWUFMiLQ/UOIR6qmD6yI/AAAAAAAAAus/QMHJ4clVYtI/s1600/094.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HNyBWUFMiLQ/UOIR6qmD6yI/AAAAAAAAAus/QMHJ4clVYtI/s320/094.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>My Australian dog</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
2012 was generally a year of change for me, as you have noticed. I left Australia, and a two-year relationship, and all my friendships. And my dog. I came back to Canada to stay (for now, anyway). I stood up with one of my oldest friends as she got married on the beach in Prince Edward Island. I asked someone to marry me for the first and probably only time in my life (he said no).<br />
<br />
And now, even though I am ostensibly settled in Montreal, my nesting skills spreading their wings, I find myself in New York City, in someone else's house again. It was my choice to come here: I'm here to see Amanda Palmer and her musicians play Prince's "Purple Rain" and ring in the New Year with a friend I've known for four years. I'm also here to visit other friends...see a new baby, see an old baby, make some bad decisions. Nothing says "New Year's Eve" like doing things you promised yourself you wouldn't do. When I think about how I spent my last two New Year's, staying up all night with Jason in the hot Australian evening, walking the streets, buying chickens, this one seems like it might be a bit tame! I'll probably be in bed by two.<br />
<br />
Someone should definitely take this kettle corn away from me, speaking of bad decisions. Urgh.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-1927895948898628452012-12-14T20:02:00.003-08:002012-12-14T20:04:47.087-08:00So, it turns out winter is a thing<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wYY2DtuAMDY/UMv2BXEKISI/AAAAAAAAAuU/UofQ4B_AAkU/s1600/IMG_20121208_160508.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wYY2DtuAMDY/UMv2BXEKISI/AAAAAAAAAuU/UofQ4B_AAkU/s320/IMG_20121208_160508.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>When Canada geese attack, really slowly, and honking.</i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I have not actually experienced a winter, a real winter, like with snow and ice and radiators and boots with the kind of lining that you take out and put on the radiator, since 2008/2009. In December of 2008, I returned to Canada to stay with my mother for a few months. In February 2009, I drove across the country and moved into a tiny pool house in southern California. <br />
<br />
Since then, it's basically been years of endless summer. Oh, sure, they have "winter" in Australia -- it rains and gets chilly enough for your nose to run. Some nights it even goes down to 1 or 2 degrees (this is Celsius, Americans)! Gosh! It's important to note, though, that West Australian houses don't have insulation or double glazing, so whatever the temperature is outside, that's what it is inside. When it's 2 degrees Celsius in your bedroom, I can tell you, it feels like minus 50. Everyone spends all winter huddled over these little gas heaters instead of investing in some fibreglass wall insulation. Then they get black lung from inhaling all the fumes. Then they do weird stuff like go swimming in shark-infested waters. I've just explained why Australians do all the potentially life-threatening things they do: poisoned on gas heater fumes.<br />
<br />
So this year, I left Australia in March, which is the beginning of autumn. I went from there to Vietnam: a sweaty, sticky country with blazing sun. I hopped right over to the hot season in Thailand, and the rains started to come just as I left at the end of May, bringing me in to summer in Canada. However, I knew it was coming, and as I ticked through September, and then October, and the chill hit the air, I realized: I don't have any winter clothes anymore.<br />
<br />
I got rid of my good boots and coats and gloves and things way back in 2009, figuring I'd get some more later when I needed them. Or, more likely, that I'd never need them again, since either global warming would hit and everywhere would be balmy and tropical, or I'd give up any idea of living in a country so gauche as to have a cold winter. Instead, my Australian visa ran out, and I was left with the option of returning to the frozen tundra of Canada, or the morally frozen tundra of the un-socialized United States. Preferring the country with universal health care, I was stuck with winter.<br />
<br />
So now that I live in Montreal, a noticeably chilly location, I am finding myself reconsidering this whole "boot" notion. In that I need to go get some. Immediately. The boots I have are lovely boots for winter if you are in California. In fact, that's where I found them: I picked them up out of the gutter in San Francisco, a perfectly good pair of Uggs that didn't smell like urine or anything. They're not waterproof though, and, as I found out in the freak nor'easter that hit New York (and me) immediately after Hurricane Sandy at the beginning of November, they suck balls for cold wet weather. So I need waterproof boots.<br />
<br />
But otherwise, I'm doing okay. Although I'm actually living here now, like actually with some furniture and my art about to go up on the walls and my books for the first time in five years...it feels unsettled. I've been moving so long, I don't actually trust that I won't be leaving again in two months. I flirt with the idea of buying some bread flour and then decide against it, because I don't want to leave it when I go. Go where? I'm staying here! My mind plays tricks on me, since I've been so used to nesting in other people's houses for the past nine months, a little mockingbird minimizing my impact on the space around me so I don't intrude. This is MY house now; I'm supposed to intrude. I'm supposed to make it look like me. (Well, like me and Marc, my housemate)<br />
<br />
The Canadian cold brings back memories of childhood winters, of wrestling my car up over the Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 2008. It reminds me how long it takes to go outside -- when you need to spend ten minutes to put on your pants and then your other pants and your gloves and your mittens and scarf and hat and coat and then you have to take everything OFF when you get to the other end...let's just stay home. It reminds me of the pleasure in seeing the snowplow go by when I don't have a car to get plowed in. I don't like being cold. I don't like winter. But I think I like this place I find myself in, cold outside, but definitely, most definitely, warm inside.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-18411871188865774762012-11-20T14:18:00.000-08:002012-11-20T14:19:38.958-08:00People talk to me in California"You want to hear something neat?" the woman sitting across from me in the Planned Parenthood waiting room asked. She was blonde and pretty, in her early 40s, with a luminous Californian grin.<br />
<br />
"Sure," I said.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iawEtivkwyE/UKwAHVlzH3I/AAAAAAAAAtU/TBOPUaoSWNY/s1600/IMG_20121103_200200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iawEtivkwyE/UKwAHVlzH3I/AAAAAAAAAtU/TBOPUaoSWNY/s320/IMG_20121103_200200.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Why people trust me, I don't know. I look ridiculous.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"I got pregnant when I was sixteen years old," she said. "I didn't know what to do, so I went to the clinic for an abortion, but they said it was too late, four months. I would've had to go to a hospital and have an overnight stay. So instead I found a nice couple and they adopted her. She just texted me on Friday." She smiled brightly. "You want to see a picture?"<br />
<br />
Her daughter, nineteen, looked just like her. She told me some more of the story: the younger daughter, from a relationship that was already on the way out. That they would be going to see her eldest at Christmas, that this was the first contact they'd had in ten years. That she never would have gotten the text if she had, as originally planned, been out on a date with a new boyfriend on Friday -- instead, he had told her that morning that he wasn't sure he saw a future with her, and so she was at home drinking wine when the text from her daughter came through. That he had called her the day before and said he wanted to be her boyfriend, that they were in it for the long haul. "So now I'm in here getting birth control," she said. "I think God brought my daughter back to me at exactly the right time."<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d1-JrHu9hZs/UKwAUutp53I/AAAAAAAAAtw/tjxSfleYI6k/s1600/IMG_20121113_104457.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d1-JrHu9hZs/UKwAUutp53I/AAAAAAAAAtw/tjxSfleYI6k/s320/IMG_20121113_104457.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Everyone could use a little gratitude du jour, right?</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Then they called her name and she went to the back rooms and I was still sitting there.<br />
<br />
People talk to me. They always talk to me. I don't know if it's because I look non-threatening (or ridiculous, as my current sartorial style could best be described as either "deranged vagrant" or "muppet") or because people are so full of stories and nobody to listen to them, that they just spill out all over the place. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k3VkBxoYcwc/UKwAYiRuJbI/AAAAAAAAAt4/1tw0fU2QqpE/s1600/IMG_20121114_144516.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k3VkBxoYcwc/UKwAYiRuJbI/AAAAAAAAAt4/1tw0fU2QqpE/s320/IMG_20121114_144516.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>I loved this woman's style.</i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm back in California. I made a bad lifestyle choice, in that I became a vegetarian in Perth about a year and a half ago, and now that I am in California for an extended period of time -- California, where the cheap tacos are a dollar and the <i>carnitas</i> melts on your tongue and the gorgeous smoky <i>carne asada</i> would make you kill a man -- I have to stare mournfully at the taco trucks and pass them by. I wish I wasn't so ethically congruent. I would be chowing down on slow-cooked ribs within a second and then lying about it. Instead, I have to eat quinoa burgers with the rest of the health-obsessed. Of course, when Ray took me to Trader Joe's for my first trip in over a year, after I finished doing a happy dance, I loaded our cart up with miniature peanut butter cups, lemon and ginger snap ice cream, and pita chips. So maybe I should revise that "health" assessment.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-up-erTVUFTk/UKwALs8Jh5I/AAAAAAAAAtc/yEwUSI48Ryw/s1600/IMG_20121108_151353.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-up-erTVUFTk/UKwALs8Jh5I/AAAAAAAAAtc/yEwUSI48Ryw/s320/IMG_20121108_151353.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>826 Brooklyn and superhero supplies.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Fortunately, since I am in San Luis Obispo, there aren't that many Mexican restaurants. Or Mexicans. Or anyone who isn't white. SLO is the whitest Californian town I have ever spent any time in; I thought San Francisco was pretty white, but SLO takes the cake. Cal Poly, the top notch engineering school in California, serenely presides on the hill over the town, and the ocean is only ten miles away; this is simultaneously a student town and a retiree town, so the vast majority of people are either under twenty or over fifty. I've been spending all my social time with Ray's Burning Man friends, though, and they definitely don't fit this demographic so at least I'm bucking the trend wherever I am.<br />
<br />
The funny thing to me about being back in California is that although I have the attitude of a Californian (or an Australian: laid back, easygoing, prefer being barefoot and eating quinoa burgers), I walk like a New Yorker. Brisk, weaving efficiently through crowds, I know exactly where I'm going and how to get there, and god help anyone who gets in my way. Fortunately, nobody ever walks in California, so I usually have the sidewalks to myself.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G9hPIRZ-8HQ/UKwAQHPjLCI/AAAAAAAAAtk/gE0KMh-A744/s1600/IMG_20121108_151403.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G9hPIRZ-8HQ/UKwAQHPjLCI/AAAAAAAAAtk/gE0KMh-A744/s320/IMG_20121108_151403.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Are you a villain? I was.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm here in SLO until the beginning of December, with a side trip down to LA-ish over Thanksgiving, and then up to the Bay Area, and then I fly back to Canada to collect everything and finally, thankfully, settle. I have an apartment and a hydro bill waiting for me in Montreal, and despite the cold, I am so looking forward to having everything of mine in one place once again. Now all I'll be missing is my suitcase in Australia that has all my good jeans in it, but I'll at last have my books, my art, my kitchen supplies. I wish I still had my large cast-iron frying pan, but that got lost to the depths of Justin's house, along with my dance sword and my dignity. As it is, I have most of everything I own, and it will once again be in the same place, and that makes me so happy, you have no idea. I didn't realize how much I missed a sense of permanence until I set up my life to not have it for about five years.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-87609368578225954302012-09-29T06:52:00.001-07:002012-09-29T06:53:00.431-07:00Return to the homely IsleI was born on Prince Edward Island.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VT_JqUG37PY/UGb8PkkWPeI/AAAAAAAAAs4/nXtTJfXB0ag/s1600/IMG_20120928_163404.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VT_JqUG37PY/UGb8PkkWPeI/AAAAAAAAAs4/nXtTJfXB0ag/s320/IMG_20120928_163404.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>It looks like this.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The smallest of Canada's provinces (for those who don't know anything about Canada) and almost the most remote, Prince Edward Island is an hour later than Ontario in time zones and about fifty years to the side in atmosphere. Using sophisticated instruments (a map and our fingers), mom and I discovered you could probably drive around the entire Island -- like circumnavigate it -- in ten hours. This is the kind of place where everybody literally knows everybody else; the whole Island only has a population of 141,000. There is a murder rate of ZERO. Probably because you'd never get away with murdering someone if they just smacked you and said, "Aren't you Mildred Gallant's boy? I thought you were raised better than that! Go on home!"<br />
<br />
PEI isn't BEHIND the rest of the world, exactly; it's not like it's super conservative (it's full of organic farming hippies and elderly women who go to erotic movies, sometimes even on purpose) or technologically backwards (even the most remote corners of the Island have cell coverage, and I know some people who update Facebook while farming). It's definitely sideways. It's like PEI took one look at where the rest of the world was going and said, "No thank you, we'll just stay over here with our potatoes."<br />
<br />
The biggest industries in PEI are potatoes and lobster. And now, apparently, Taiwanese Buddhist monks, who are quietly and enthusiastically building a monastery about half an hour outside of the only major city, Charlottetown (population 60,000, most of whom know each other on sight). It is a strange and lovely place.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iD8k2x5IxAQ/UGb8KxwblJI/AAAAAAAAAso/8FP0ii4uLJE/s1600/IMG_20120911_110137.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iD8k2x5IxAQ/UGb8KxwblJI/AAAAAAAAAso/8FP0ii4uLJE/s320/IMG_20120911_110137.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>I am totally catching lobsters RIGHT NOW. In my bathtub.</i></td></tr>
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Since I was born here, I will forever be an Islander. I haven't lived here since 1988, but when people ask me if I'm from here, that's what they mean. My mother, on the other hand, who lived here before I was born and is now planning to retire here, will always be "from away" even if she spends the next thirty years here. We're long-lived in my family. This will probably happen. Owning property, living here year round through the brutal and solidarity-inducing winters, none of that makes a difference...BECAUSE YOU WERE BORN IN CONNECTICUT.<br />
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When I was seven or eight, the big controversy on PEI was whether or not to build the "Fixed Link": what's now called the Confederation Bridge. The longest free-standing bridge in Canada, it's 13 kms and connects PEI with the mainland so those potato deliveries can flow more smoothly. Before the bridge, there was only a ferry, and in the winter, I remember seeing little ice breaker boats cheerily allowing us to get back home so we wouldn't be stuck in New Brunswick until the thaw. When I was a kid, winter lasted approximately 297 months of the year and it got down to -40. Now, probably because of the bridge and those DAMN FOREIGNERS, winter is milder and there's less snow, less low temperatures, more confused Canada geese who forgot to migrate.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mrcB1YEZLvU/UGb8NYk9stI/AAAAAAAAAsw/vxbxlvQ2CHY/s1600/IMG_20120923_143538.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mrcB1YEZLvU/UGb8NYk9stI/AAAAAAAAAsw/vxbxlvQ2CHY/s320/IMG_20120923_143538.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A door on Water St. Of course there's a Water St.</i></td></tr>
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As an Islander, whether I live here or not, whether I love it or not, this is my home. It's funny to think that in a whole world of wandering and travel, I might someday end up living down the road from my oldest friend. Not that she's the oldest -- she's the same age as me -- but we've known each other literally since we were born. My mother is looking at property that is literally down the road from where M will build her future house, and where her mother's house stands right now: the bizarre hexagonal fairy house that I grew up in, reading Archie comics and staring at the poster of cloud names on the wall outside the bathroom (cumulonimbus...cirrostratus...). <br />
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For someone as crazily nostalgic as me, it seems fitting that I'm currently, literally, living in the past. Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-35368872389118714152012-05-28T18:59:00.000-07:002012-05-28T18:59:22.495-07:00Chiang Mai love songFor a place that I enjoyed so much, and spent almost a month in, I haven't said anything at all about Chiang Mai. A monastery is pretty weird, right? Everyone wants to know what you're doing in there. Are you sacrificing babies to Buddha? Are you allowed to eat anything? How do monks keep their robes on? (answers: no, not really, and staples)<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTXouyW-m_Y/T8QroxGR4UI/AAAAAAAAArI/t0NvoTpuJeM/s1600/IMG_1879.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tTXouyW-m_Y/T8QroxGR4UI/AAAAAAAAArI/t0NvoTpuJeM/s320/IMG_1879.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tiffin boxes: part of the dark rituals of Buddhism.</i></td></tr>
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Chiang Mai, despite being such a touristy city that I heard someone refer to it as Farang Mai, was less exciting. Yeah, there's a lot of temples to see...but I'd just been living in one, so I didn't really need to go stare at another vihahn. You seen one ornate gilded building with carved naga on the top covered with mirrorball style glass pieces, you seen them all. Chiang Mai, for me, was pretty much an instant hometown.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p8ZoxEZf63c/T8QrusZ-ONI/AAAAAAAAArY/ZOUbcMysPF8/s1600/IMG_1885.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p8ZoxEZf63c/T8QrusZ-ONI/AAAAAAAAArY/ZOUbcMysPF8/s320/IMG_1885.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>I lived in soi 9. So did a lot of other hippies.</i></td></tr>
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I only expected to stay for two weeks. I had all these plans: I was going to stay in Chiang Mai for long enough to get re-assimilated to normal society and stop waking up at 5am to meditate, and then as soon as I'd gotten back to normal, I would go stay at Watra Songtham Kalyanee (Thailand's only feminist monastery, run entirely by fully-ordained women). I'd maybe go to Ayuthaya or maybe I might even go down to Phuket or something. I had a lot of time to kill before having to be in Bangkok for my flight to Canada on May 30. Time was a yawning gulf stretching out in front of me; I had nothing but time.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mEclHwP2WTM/T8QrsDKCVmI/AAAAAAAAArQ/UvVwGlrBuow/s1600/IMG_1884.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mEclHwP2WTM/T8QrsDKCVmI/AAAAAAAAArQ/UvVwGlrBuow/s320/IMG_1884.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>You know what's weird? Pickaninny lawn ornaments in Thailand.</i></td></tr>
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Instead, I stayed in Chiang Mai for almost a month, and seemed to fill almost every waking hour with some awesome new thing. This was probably mostly because of the spontaneous and amazing friendship circle that rose up around me -- after the first week of meditating alone, walking around alone, and working in internet cafes a lot (although I did have a nice routine going), I suddenly fell smack into a vibrant social life.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cxjm3UAXxtw/T8QrziasZ0I/AAAAAAAAAro/eQLokSzrfeY/s1600/IMG_1889.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cxjm3UAXxtw/T8QrziasZ0I/AAAAAAAAAro/eQLokSzrfeY/s320/IMG_1889.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Usually once a day, these tuk tuk parades would go by.</i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i> </i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></td></tr>
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As an example of how perfect this was, I posted on the Chiang Mai couchsurfing forum looking for people who don't like drinking or staying out late, stating that I'd rather watch movies at someone's house than go to a bar, and rather do yoga than kegstands. Wave a magic wand and a week or two later I was getting invited to movie nights, making salad for dinner, and discussing asanas. Basically, it only took a few days for exactly what I wanted to land in my lap.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xl3XujDSPf8/T8QrwtDknZI/AAAAAAAAArg/NlQn0ACb0II/s1600/IMG_1887.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xl3XujDSPf8/T8QrwtDknZI/AAAAAAAAArg/NlQn0ACb0II/s320/IMG_1887.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Very! Emphatic! Sign!</i></td></tr>
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My Chiang Mai crew were primarily yogis -- through a complicated pathway of chatting with a teacher after class and slowly insinuating myself into activities (although this group is mostly amorphously hanging out with each other all the time: you go for dinner, they're all there...you want to go to the movies, everyone will come), I suddenly ended up being on the invite list for swimming pools, yoga practice, lunch at Pun Pun, and dinner at the macrobiotic restaurant. I was teased and hugged and welcomed and given a nickname. I was family. And then on top of the yogis, there was also <a href="http://toomanyadapters.com/">Dustin</a>, the computer film buff guy...you know, exactly who I've been best friends with my entire life. He and I went on a photo shoot adventure together (these remain the only photos I took in Chiang Mai), ate lunch, saw The Avengers, texted.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G-a_UEfiTMU/T8Qr2jxULzI/AAAAAAAAArw/xUfrttqE9lk/s1600/IMG_1893.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G-a_UEfiTMU/T8Qr2jxULzI/AAAAAAAAArw/xUfrttqE9lk/s320/IMG_1893.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Oh Buddhists. You sound creepy sometimes.</i></td></tr>
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Friends made Chiang Mai amazing. Chiang Mai is pretty great, with its organic vegetarian restaurants and friendly faces, its misting machines outside restaurants and beautiful looming mountain, at the top of which Wat Doi Suthep glowers down like a white and gold deity. Chiang Mai has leafy back alleys and open, airy houses with lush backyards. Chiang Mai is pretty good. Friends made it fantastic. <br />
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I can't really tell you what it's like, except for everything I've already mentioned. It's basically the best city in the world for me except for the oppressive humidity and constant mosquitoes: there are secondhand shops, markets where you can get an all-fruit smoothie put together especially for you for only 20 baht, a vegetarian buffet with fresh local food made daily for about 10 baht a plate, art exhibits, yoga yoga yoga. I got everywhere by cycling, a rickety fixie rented from my hostel. Even the rain was warm. If you could have made a town especially for me, I don't know how different it would have been. Maybe the rain would have been made of chocolate.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-89283692921953803722012-05-15T03:01:00.003-07:002012-05-15T03:01:43.261-07:00Finally: My Day at the TempleAfter having been in Chiang Mai for two weeks now, I finally got around to carrying my camera out of the hostel and, you know, plugging it in. So here goes, with dramatic photos: My Day at Wat Tam Pha Noi.<br />
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4am: Roosters in Shan village down the hill start crowing.<br />
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5:15am: Sun actually starts to rise.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uUV_qef93Lk/T6yjjWS1d-I/AAAAAAAAAnM/vWp3nMurcpg/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uUV_qef93Lk/T6yjjWS1d-I/AAAAAAAAAnM/vWp3nMurcpg/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+002.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>View off my front porch at about 5:15am</i></td></tr>
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Somewhere between 5 and 5:30am: Actually wake up<br />
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5:30am-6:30am: Half hour walking meditation, half hour sitting meditation while listening to sounds of birds, dogs barking, and puppy rustling in the leaves below, which unconcentrated mind immediately translates to "snake rustling in leaves below"<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WtPbYVcqbT4/T6yj-QbMFDI/AAAAAAAAAnU/T_IKUu621yo/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WtPbYVcqbT4/T6yj-QbMFDI/AAAAAAAAAnU/T_IKUu621yo/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+033.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Aforementioned puppy.</i></td></tr>
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6:34am: Roosters in Shan village still crowing.<br />
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6:35am: Climb at least 73 steps up to main cave area<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qifYxi86hxs/T6ykdLY-q_I/AAAAAAAAAns/Yb-Esa24rGw/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qifYxi86hxs/T6ykdLY-q_I/AAAAAAAAAns/Yb-Esa24rGw/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+005.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pathway from the steps over to my kuti</i></td></tr>
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6:40am-7:40 or 8am: Sweeping. All the sweeping. Sweeping is actually one of the things that is on the list of things monks have to do every day. There is no list of things guests have to do every day, but there aren't that many monks at Tam Pha Noi, and there are a lot of leaves. One morning immediately after sweeping I saw a four-foot-long green-grey snake lying across the road. I said "Wargh!" It didn't say anything.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kpCYBjXaohc/T6ylT0QPnZI/AAAAAAAAAn8/fx9Ce2fWG9Q/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+030.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kpCYBjXaohc/T6ylT0QPnZI/AAAAAAAAAn8/fx9Ce2fWG9Q/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+030.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>All the sweeping.</i></td></tr>
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Around 8:15am: Breakfast, after monks return from pindabhat (alms round) with food -- before monks return, there isn't really much to eat.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xKRjdRVu1YQ/T6yls6XFTZI/AAAAAAAAAoE/aobYkppQgy0/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+023.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xKRjdRVu1YQ/T6yls6XFTZI/AAAAAAAAAoE/aobYkppQgy0/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+023.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>There's something awesome about washing dishes and staring out over some mountains covered with lychee plantations.</i></td></tr>
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8:45am or so: Return to kuti for toothbrushing, first bucket shower of the day, sometimes laundry meditation, sometimes tea drinking<br />
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9:40am: Bell rings for chanting<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V8hRJ60o_wA/T6ymlmbHi1I/AAAAAAAAAok/IA5qqgBhriI/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+031.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V8hRJ60o_wA/T6ymlmbHi1I/AAAAAAAAAok/IA5qqgBhriI/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+031.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The bells tell the monks it's time for chanting...also the surrounding devas</i></td></tr>
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9:45am: Chanting in cave. Fear bees.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5BJUg1IYUjw/T6ym0eFhVPI/AAAAAAAAAos/oy8fxxir6Mk/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5BJUg1IYUjw/T6ym0eFhVPI/AAAAAAAAAos/oy8fxxir6Mk/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+028.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Full of bees.</i></td></tr>
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10:30am: Mealtime! Sometimes there are guests who have brought food in for the monks and they share with us. Sometimes it's just one monk and me serving food.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4TnHC42XSME/T7Im0Pn3UBI/AAAAAAAAApM/-MzzLVoGVOQ/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4TnHC42XSME/T7Im0Pn3UBI/AAAAAAAAApM/-MzzLVoGVOQ/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+006.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>When I first came to the wat, this floor wasn't tiled.</i></td></tr>
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The way this works at Tam Pha Noi is: the monk(s) sit on a raised area in the long dining hall. They bow 3 times to the Buddha when they enter (paying respect to the Triple Gem, the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha). They rinse their bowls, and extend a receiving cloth, since they can't touch anything that I am touching, since I'm a lady. The whole time, I have been kneeling respectfully at the base of the eating area. When the receiving cloth is out, I put the food on it and wai. Sometimes I do it one dish at a time, sometimes I connect all the dishes, so they count as "offered." Monks can't eat anything unless it has been properly offered. When they finish with the food, they place it to one side, I come over, wai, pick it up, and carry it back to the kitchen, where everyone else (usually just me and the other mae chi) get to eat it.<br />
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11:30am: Walking meditation OR staring mournfully at the wall in the kuti thinking some combination of "I ate too much" and "It's very hot". Sometimes, second shower of the day.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HOYDsTVsiLs/T7Io2v2IUfI/AAAAAAAAAp8/BJjlb2_gVRw/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HOYDsTVsiLs/T7Io2v2IUfI/AAAAAAAAAp8/BJjlb2_gVRw/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+004.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>View behind the kitchen</i></td></tr>
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Between noon and 4pm: Combination of things! It's usually too warm or, in the last few days of my stay, raining, so often I did in-kuti things. I read Anna Karenina. I meditated, both walking and sitting. I washed clothes, when I had to, which was almost every day, because I only brought one set of clothes and they have to be white. This got easier when I discovered a second set of whites in the kitchen cupboards, and then I only had to do laundry half as much.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--iN7-HT_85I/T7InVd74CmI/AAAAAAAAApU/Evh5JkEpF0g/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--iN7-HT_85I/T7InVd74CmI/AAAAAAAAApU/Evh5JkEpF0g/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+001.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>I shoveled all this gravel and dug holes for the bricks.</i></td></tr>
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Sometimes this time period also involved helping Phra Boon Tam with various projects, like shovelling gravel and building a pathway for a spirit house at the front of the temple, or helping him in his dhamma garden. Hard labour, basically. In white clothes. Laundry was a big part of my stay at Tam Pha Noi.<br />
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4:15pm: Confused roosters, either paralysed by existential crisis or distracted by chicken sex, finally fall silent.<br />
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Between 4 and 4:30pm: Snacktime! By which I mean "Milo time". You can't eat anything after noon, but you can drink things...and the only things we have with calories in them are Milo and coffee! The coffee has milk powder in it, so I can't drink it (unless I wish to experience the meditative pleasure of squat toilets), but the Milo only has nondairy creamer. This, while not affecting my lactose intolerance, probably gave me brain cancer.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LGhu6NiQ6pU/T7Inm3jFLRI/AAAAAAAAApc/2iIMqUE6kU8/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LGhu6NiQ6pU/T7Inm3jFLRI/AAAAAAAAApc/2iIMqUE6kU8/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+005.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mama cat...still a kitten herself</i></td></tr>
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4:15pm: Climb up at least 73 steps to the kitchen. Heat water in kettle. Make Milo. Play with kittens. Kitchen cat had four kittens about three days before I got there, and their eyes were open by the time I left)<br />
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4:30pm-5:15pm: Read in kitchen, enjoying Milo and view<br />
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5:30pm: Walking meditation time, usually up to the stupa area, because that's the coolest place in the temple when the wind starts to blow.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sunset over broken candles</i></td></tr>
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Around 6:30pm: Make the long up and downhill hike to the vihahn to watch the sun set over the hills and the lights come up on the road between Chiang Mai and Fang. This is pretty impressive.<br />
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7:15pm: Head back to kuti in almost-dark, with flashlight trained resolutely on ground and heart pounding in throat in case I encounter a) snakes, b) scorpions, c) tarantulas. Actually encounter: a) dogs, b) dogs, c) more dogs. Blackie has special game: nip pants leg.<br />
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7:30pm: Sitting meditation on front porch, with mosquito headnet. In middle of meditation, dog arrives on porch and either chews vigorously at back legs, licks hands and face, or pants heavily.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EW8yxgslE6E/T7IoA9Je0kI/AAAAAAAAAps/DIHtxk1Dkwo/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EW8yxgslE6E/T7IoA9Je0kI/AAAAAAAAAps/DIHtxk1Dkwo/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+003.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mae Chi Mimi, so called because she's probably a reincarnated nun</i></td></tr>
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8:10pm: Brush teeth, final bucket shower of day. Candlelight very pretty but reveals multitudes of ants crawling industriously across kuti floor and my feet. Dog remains on porch, imitating dead dog.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Blackie likes my head</i></td></tr>
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8:20pm: Climb into bed. Thrash violently to free mosquitos trapped under mosquito net and tentatively pat at bedding to ensure no scorpions have entered during daytime. Reading.<br />
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8:30pm: Loud Singing Time in Shan village. They don't have electricity so have to make their own fun.<br />
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8:45pm: Bedtime in Shan village. Only sounds crickets, confused giant beetles, dog breathing. Lightning bugs everywhere.<br />
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Between 9 and 9:30pm: Bedtime for Claire! Turn off flashlight. Immediately fall asleep.<br />
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When there is more than one monk going on alms round in the morning, I was allowed to go too. So those days had an amended portion that looked like this:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>View out the back of the pickup truck going down the mountain</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BBIztKJpdtU/T7IpKQ2sphI/AAAAAAAAAqM/lwRdgdSZxWs/s1600/WatTamPhaNoi+009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BBIztKJpdtU/T7IpKQ2sphI/AAAAAAAAAqM/lwRdgdSZxWs/s320/WatTamPhaNoi+009.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Drug dealer's gate in the Chinese village</i></td></tr>
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6:15am: Meet at truck for cheerful Shan driver to take us into town, driving down the mountain, through a confused Chinese village apparently run by drug smugglers in enormous houses, and to the nearest Thai village.<br />
6:30am-7:45am: Alms round.<br />
7:45am-8:15am: Errands, return to temple.<br />
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When I wasn't on alms round, I didn't leave the temple. This meant I didn't leave the temple for nine days.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-61526401236736172482012-04-16T06:25:00.003-07:002012-04-16T06:25:55.454-07:00Songkram at the temple<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Songkram is the Thai New Year and supposedly a festival to bring the rainy season. Like other festivals designed to bring something, it has a lot of chucking whatever that thing is about -- in this case, water. I didn't get any pictures of the actual chucking, as to do so would have meant getting my camera completely saturated, but basically, for the past four days you can't walk or drive anywhere without strategically placed groups of children hurling buckets of water on you. Bicycles and motorcycles are favorite targets.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>You see a lot of trucks with unruly youth and barrels of water in the back. They will get you.</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the temple, they were preparing a procession of Buddha figurines in pickup trucks -- they take the Buddhas out so people can pour water over them to make merit for the new year. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A few people waved me and another guy who's staying here along, so we shrugged and hopped on the back of the pickup. We spent three hours touring around Fang's back alleys, getting absolutely soaked by smiling Thai people and flinging water back at them and giggling. There were bright green rice fields and happy smiling people throwing jasmine water over me and the little pool of water between my butt and the wheel hump I was sitting on was nice and warm. At one point, speaking of warm water, the entire procession pulled over, and the guy driving our pickup jubilantly shouted "Toilet!" and pointed to the nearby foliage, where almost everybody had dismounted and were peeing away into the shrubs. Including the monks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Eventually, they took us to a karaoke bar in the middle of nowhere and offered us food and alcohol, neither of which we were allowed to have because of the eight precepts. So we just sat and clapped along to the karaoke and chatted in hand signals and then they said we should sing something and they programmed the machine with a video that I think was the Pussycat Dolls or something else equally naughty, and we pretended to be offended and everybody laughed and shook our hands when we left. And then they took us to another bar where the monks all went swimming, and finally we had to beg them to return us to the Wat in time for chanting.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">That was Friday.</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K-vDbWijfIs/T4wO0sXpgsI/AAAAAAAAAm8/3FPXsYiIE-Y/s1600/Clairephotosongkram+033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K-vDbWijfIs/T4wO0sXpgsI/AAAAAAAAAm8/3FPXsYiIE-Y/s320/Clairephotosongkram+033.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This was the crowd around the Abbott. You can barely see his bright orange robes. Oh wait, you can always see bright orange robes.</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sunday was Songkram day proper, and the temple was PACKED. Everyone started showing up around 5:45 to start finding places in the large sala, and there were food donations coming out people's ears. Apparently you get extra merit if you donate on Songkram so we had food everywhere, with novices having to carry out the giant trays of it every ten minutes, empty them, and then come back for more. They had about four stations with different monks set up to chant blessings for anyone who wanted to donate money. It was a madhouse, a madhouse.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uAl7anHDU3c/T4wOwh_CfVI/AAAAAAAAAm0/Tp-c6sxgjwk/s1600/Clairephotosongkram+028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uAl7anHDU3c/T4wOwh_CfVI/AAAAAAAAAm0/Tp-c6sxgjwk/s320/Clairephotosongkram+028.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This was the pile of shoes outside our dining hall. Everyone was going in and out constantly hurling more food at the novices.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tables in the big sala.</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The day before, a bunch of people showed up with piles of sand. Apparently, laypeople are not allowed to take anything from the temple and since they track out sand on their shoes every day of the year, when Songkram comes, they have to bring it back. So they do, in a big pile, and then they make little sand "chedis" out of it (they're like sand holy relics, as opposed to sandcastles). On Sunday, everyone came and decorated the big sand pile with banners.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Some very serious older people made this one.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Banners! Banners everywhere!</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The monks received all their food and chanted a lot, and then everybody left and by noon, the temple was silent, hot, and still. It was hard to believe that the madness had happened at all.</span></div>Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-23425777431599327952012-04-12T06:55:00.000-07:002012-04-12T06:55:08.133-07:00Wat you talkin' 'bout?On the spur of the moment (okay, not really), I decided to go stay in a Buddhist temple in northern Thailand. It seemed spur of the moment because I thought, "I wonder if there are temples you can go stay in?" one day when I was with Nancy in Hue, and then a few days later I had confirmation from Phra Chuntawongso (aka Phra Greg) that I could pop round to Sri Boon Ruang and stay as long as I liked. I arbitrarily chose a month, and have been here since April 3.<br />
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So it wasn't really that crazy for several reasons. First, and I feel this cannot be overstated enough, I am a big hippie. Second, Nancy made me start meditating with her in Vietnam, and I felt like I wanted to learn how to do it properly. Third, I wanted to learn how to do it properly without going to a frightening meditation retreat like those listed on Travelfish: 21 days of navel-gazing accompanied by 4am rising, 10pm bedtime, loads of sitting still, and no singing, dancing, reading, writing, or yoga. When I told my mom about these, she asked if they had places where you could wall yourself up if you liked. Probably, is the answer.<br />
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Fourth, this is a way to be kind to myself. Having basically abruptly yanked myself from a life that I loved, a life I was really at HOME in, I find myself fragile and prone to incapacitating sadness. All through my travels in Vietnam, I'd occasionally be immobilized by thinking, "Well, I'll never see that yoga teacher again -- the one with the nice smile and dark hair at The Yoga Space on Hay." Or, and this one was a doozy, picturing with perfect clarity the inside of my house, and walking through it, mentally touching all the things I love and took with me and all the things I love and left behind.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The rainy season is supposed to be in July. This is, nonetheless, a common sight out my window. Thailand has broken the precept against lying!</i></td></tr>
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So incapacitating sadness being what it is, I was hoping I could find a way to manage it. A Buddhist temple seemed like a good idea: peaceful, calm, all about meditating and inner peace and whatnot. (Watnot?)<br />
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It's been really, really interesting. I go on morning alms round with the monks, as the sun is rising; wrapped like big orange sausages in their robes, they walk quietly from house to house. When someone calls to them they stop, allow the people to place food in their alms bowl, and then chant a simple Pali verse blessing the person. Most of the laypeople kneel and pour water on the ground while the monks chant. After this, they move on. The air is cool and there's often birdsong -- and occasionally, inexplicable loud broadcasts of music and talking, like a radio station that starts neighbourhood-wide at 6am.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Monks are only allowed to drink orange things. Just kidding. They can also drink repulsive sugary energy drinks.</i></td></tr>
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I meditate. This is interesting too, and simultaneously incredibly, massively boring. You really are just sitting. And noticing the present moment. You always have new present moments, so you think it would be entertaining, but actually what happens is your mind gets distracted incredibly easily and starts planning what you're going to do after you meditate, or a sensation that you have reminds you of a thing that happened when you were twelve blah blah blah. Several times, I've actually managed to achieve pure inner awareness and focus on the present moment, which is then immediately broken when I internally say, "Hey, I'm meditating!"<br />
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The meditating and Buddhism are actually helping me not be so sad. Turns out, when you're trying to be in the present moment, you don't let your mind bring up scenarios it loves to torture you with ("Remember your dog? Yeah, you'll never see him again."), because those are in the past. It puts the brakes on sadness pretty fast. I can't wrap my mind around how it seems to be a lot like forgetting, though -- I value the people and memories I have. In Buddhism, this attachment to things we like is fine, so long as you realize they are impermanent and you will eventually be without them, and that will cause you suffering. I have firsthand experience with this. But I still wouldn't want to give up loving, remembering, feeling, thinking, doing, being. I have so many people I have such great memories of -- and only living in the present moment denies me access to them.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>On the princess' funeral day, they burned a symbolic tower of stuff. And people lit candles. It was pretty. They also had fireworks. And a bunch of guys in military uniforms with swords. A lot happened I didn't understand. This is a recurring theme in Thailand.</i></td></tr>
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Still no decisions on whether or not Buddhism is for me. But I feel less sad.<br />
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Also, in very exciting news, I have learned how to say "No MSG" in Thai. That brings my total number of Thai phrases to about four, including "Hello", "Thank you," "No problem," and "No MSG." I've tried "I am a vegetarian" but either my accent is terrible or the concept is confusing, because nobody ever understands.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-78274535919403977112012-03-29T06:41:00.000-07:002012-03-29T06:41:03.822-07:00Come, Muse, let us sing of rats!So there is a...somewhat lax attentional focus on restaurant hygiene in Vietnam. There's also a somewhat lax idea of what exactly constitutes a restaurant; for example, a fewplastic tables and garden stools that appear to have been made for gnomes, a portable deep fryer carried by a tiny woman using a neck yoke, and 10kg of tofu, and you have yourself a street cafe.<br />
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But aside from that, even in the official-looking restaurants (tables with cloths on them! napkins! waiters!), hygiene is significantly understated. Dogs and cats usually wander through, either looking for food by people's feet, or actually looking for the feet, in the case of one tiny puppy that we found had an affinity for gnawing on my Crocs. People frequently throw their trash on the floor. And on the street, and in the lakes and rivers, but that's another post. Nancy and I once watched a woman squat to pee next to the museum in Hue (which was mysteriously boarded up and unoccupied), haul her pants back up, and return to her food stand without even thinking of hand sanitizer. This is why <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/tabithacarvan">Tabitha</a> told us we probably have worms.<br />
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Another thing you see a lot in restaurants is rats. Not mice. Rats. The first few times I saw them, I sort of internally squealed and went Ewewewew. Our last trip to the excellent vegetarian restaurant Nancy and I found in Hue (called Lien Hoa, only a few blocks from the main backpacker drag, and in a gorgeous pagoda), we watched one run back and forth in the garden next to where we were sitting with a sort of detached calm...then he hoppedover the wall and into the restaurant under a table...and under some more tables. We were both just kind of watching him sniff between the chairs, penetrating further and further into the restaurant when I said, "You know, I feel like I've really adapted to being here. Instead of going to a restaurant thinking, 'There couldn't possibly be any rats there', now I'm just thinking, 'I'd prefer if it didn't crawl on my foot.'"<br />
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Nancy laughed, and when we looked up, we noticed one of the waiters watching the rat with the same lackadaisical interest we had. He saw us and sort of shrugged, and we sort of shrugged back, and then we had some more tea. It was very much like, <i>Eh well. Rats.</i><br />
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In other news, Hanoi Water Puppet Theatre is REDONKULOUS. All of the tour groups are totally shnozzled into going to this famous theatre form, which even the Lonely Planet describes as a "whimsical treat". Nancy and I certainly felt we were having a cultural experience, particularly at the points when the water buffalo's heads were totally immersed in the water while they were being waved around, so that they looked like they were drowning. At one point, some puppets came out with candles on their hands, and I whispered, "Knowing how things go in this country, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole stage caught fire." It didn't.<br />
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Nancy and I have dubbed it "Janky-nam", as literally everything is janky. It's sort of charming. But also? Redonkulous.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-91745027954473729282012-03-23T02:31:00.000-07:002012-03-23T02:31:01.872-07:00In which I am the funniest thing on earthI have often thought of myself as a funny person. I engage in the occasional witticism, and even bandy about a few puns now and then. Wordplay is, as it were, my forte. But I have never had so many people point and laugh, grabbing their friends' arms to pull their heads around so they can point and laugh, as I have in Vietnam. You know why? My hair.<br />
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Pink hair is just about the funniest thing everybody has seen, ever. Babies, grandmothers, indigenous people, schoolboys riding dinky on the back of other schoolboys' bicycles...I have sent each of them into paroxysms of laughter, just by existing. It's nice to be the fountain of such joy.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zEq6GNnSzxk/T2w_QYNfGlI/AAAAAAAAAkE/4kXkbiTgr-I/s1600/IMG_1597.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zEq6GNnSzxk/T2w_QYNfGlI/AAAAAAAAAkE/4kXkbiTgr-I/s320/IMG_1597.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>This is a civet that coffee beans get passed through in order to make what the Vietnamese call "weasel coffee". Nancy and I have decided that "Poop Weasel" will be our next band name.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>These people on boats also thought my hair was funny.</i></td></tr>
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Since last I wrote, I've been on a 5-day motorcycle tour of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, moving from small town to small town across the slowly-being-decimated jungle-y mountains. Nancy's poor botanist heart was breaking at every hairpin turn that revealed more of the canopy cut down for agriculture: tapioca, corn, rice, everything.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e8Ad372FFog/T2xAGjuH7BI/AAAAAAAAAlU/DUqdrHy5HV0/s1600/IMG_1647.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e8Ad372FFog/T2xAGjuH7BI/AAAAAAAAAlU/DUqdrHy5HV0/s320/IMG_1647.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Just to be different, this section of canopy was also on fire.</i></span> </div>
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This agriculture is perpetuated mostly by tiny, wiry women wearing traditional hats and as many other clothes as they can possibly manage, in an effort to avoid getting dark skin. Dark skin, as in most cultures that are naturally prone to it, is considered hideous, and only pale skin will do -- to this end, Vietnamese women wear hats, scarves, dust masks, hoodies, long-sleeved shirts, pants, gloves, and boots or flip-flops with "flesh" toned socks underneath them. Sometimes I see a lady on a scooter next to me with armpit-length white gloves, filthy with grime from the air, and wonder what she actually looks like under there. My guess? Paler than me.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PQNvpJnu6o4/T2w_tt6uW-I/AAAAAAAAAks/eRwP-bxL1Uw/s320/IMG_1630.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>She is probably laughing at me under all those clothes.</i></span></td></tr>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PQNvpJnu6o4/T2w_tt6uW-I/AAAAAAAAAks/eRwP-bxL1Uw/s1600/IMG_1630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a> The quiet and green of the hills was only rivalled by the insane tootling of buses bearing down on our little motorcycles at about nine million miles an hour, on whatever side of the road they felt like. Vietnamese driving is...creative. Nancy calls it "no rules driving", but there are rules: they're just really basic. Rule number 1: drive wherever you feel like it, whether there is a green light or not. Rule number 2: honk vigorously while doing so, to warn other vehicles of your approach. Ta-da!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JgoRN2HlfIM/T2xACJ05IFI/AAAAAAAAAlM/-b-6Vu_6Uxo/s1600/IMG_1639.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JgoRN2HlfIM/T2xACJ05IFI/AAAAAAAAAlM/-b-6Vu_6Uxo/s320/IMG_1639.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Other vehicles on the road include ox-carts.</i></td></tr>
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Fortunately, most of the other vehicles are motorcycles or little 125cc scooter jobbies, which weave in and out between the potholes and bicycles and water buffalo with ease. This ease is remarkable given how much stuff they usually have strapped on the back of their motorcycles. I know it's a bit of a stereotype to be all "ha, ha, Asian people can fit a lot of stuff on a motorcycle", but I've never seen such impressive toting skills. In the time since I last posted, I've seen people carrying baskets of chickens and ducklings, an inlaid wooden wardrobe, a car radiator, a pane of glass, 8 piglets, 5 50-kg bags of tapioca, three small children, and an entire other motorcycle. I don't know how the engines don't just gasp once and die.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BbL8wYFNPVE/T2w_eXl5NvI/AAAAAAAAAkU/0TbdlFWhbIU/s1600/IMG_1618.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BbL8wYFNPVE/T2w_eXl5NvI/AAAAAAAAAkU/0TbdlFWhbIU/s320/IMG_1618.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>These shoes were in a very, very poor M'Nong village.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9zOD7kPOXak/T2w_iouECuI/AAAAAAAAAkc/DtjsbR3wXaw/s1600/IMG_1620.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9zOD7kPOXak/T2w_iouECuI/AAAAAAAAAkc/DtjsbR3wXaw/s320/IMG_1620.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>You could also be traveling by impoverished houseboat flotilla.</i></td></tr>
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Having settled temporarily (for a week) in Hue, a coastal town with an intellectual reputation, we are spending a lot of our time cycling around looking at things ("Hey, look, a pagoda!") and wondering what things are ("Hey, look, is that a bicycle repair shop or a hairdresser's? Oh wait, it's both."). We have found a favorite coffee shop (called, straightforwardly, "Coffee"), and we know where the bank is that will let us take out more than $100 at a time -- Vietnamese ATMs like to to charge exorbitant fees for their services, and they like to do it frequently. Consider it your little foreigner tax. Along with getting separate prices on your English menus.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1EW4Gsyxci8/T2w_Y9lUZhI/AAAAAAAAAkM/KUrLvVS3hmo/s1600/IMG_1610.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1EW4Gsyxci8/T2w_Y9lUZhI/AAAAAAAAAkM/KUrLvVS3hmo/s320/IMG_1610.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"Hey, is that a glowing LED swastika behind that Buddha?"</i></td></tr>
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Most of the backpackers we're seeing are European or Australian; on speculating last night, Nancy and I wondered if the American economy is still so bad from the GFC that nobody can afford to travel. The only reason I can afford to travel is because I've been working in Australia at exorbitant pay rates.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>How could the hotel be bad when it has an air-conditioner remote-holder that looks like this?</i></span> </div>
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<br /></div>
So far, our hotels have been universally nice, some with bathrooms the size of Manhattan apartments. I did yoga in the bathroom a few mornings ago, it was that big. No bedbugs or lice or anything other than the occasional pervasive smell of mold and honking outside our window at about 6:30am. It's good that Nancy and I are such big nannas that we go to bed at 10 and wake up at 6 like the Vietnamese do, because otherwise, the cacophony of roosters, motorcycles, Vietnamese pop crooning, and construction work would definitely wake us up. It's like everyone says, "Surely people can't still be asleep at 7am. I will start my jackhammer!" There is an excellent blog I recently discovered, called <a href="http://www.thecitythatneversleepsin.com/">The City That Never Sleeps In</a>, about an Australian ex-pat in Hanoi, and it is incredibly hilarious if you've been in Vietnam for a little bit. Although perhaps those are hysterical laughs on my part.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-69795437263762571332012-03-14T05:00:00.003-07:002012-03-14T05:01:25.654-07:00Hard YakkaWe're standing in between two fields of young coffee; coffee doesn't produce useable beans until it is 5 years old, and these bright green sprouts are only 1. They are small, but Sinh, our guide (I've changed his name, more on that later), says they grow to look like trees.<br />
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Today we're climbing the three peaks of the Lang Biang mountain. Lang and Biang are the star-crossed lovers of Da Lat, the small, cool mountain town we're currently in. They died a long time ago and their bodies formed this mountain range, which we have paid Groovy Gecko $20 each to help us up.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f4iUG8sPBKc/T2CHLjaRuBI/AAAAAAAAAj8/eQGZ4WLvhzM/s1600/Claire+photosagain+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f4iUG8sPBKc/T2CHLjaRuBI/AAAAAAAAAj8/eQGZ4WLvhzM/s320/Claire+photosagain+002.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Not a mountain range; instead, a brightly lit market. Bet you couldn't have told the difference.</i></span></div>
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As we climb through tall, thin pine trees, we start to talk. We ask Sinh why he came to Da Lat from outside Saigon, two years ago.<br />
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"Da Lat very beautiful, scenery very beautiful, women very beautiful," he says, and laughs. "Here women very...how you say the word? You tell you love them and they say they not interested. Very hard."<br />
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"Unrequited?" Nancy suggests, and he likes that, repeating "unrequited" several times. "Unrequited, is when you love girl but she don't love you, very sad," he says.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>You know what's not sad? Making a fun. In the beat.</i></span></div>
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Then, he tells us about a police lady he has his eye on. He saw her on the street a few weeks ago and thought she was beautiful, but then it turned out she's a friend of his coworker. "Maybe we will go for coffee, then to dinner," he says, "then maybe she will want to be girlfriend with me. On third date I will tell her I love her."<br />
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His first love was a girl in high school, younger than him but very smart, working very hard in school, and very beautiful -- the perfect woman, he calls her. His family sent him away to seminary school and when he came out, she had moved to Sydney. "But we talk on Facebook," he says.<br />
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There's a silence as the road continues to tilt up, and then he says, "If your boyfriend have sex with another girl, would you be angry at him?" Nancy and I burst out laughing, and he finally reveals that he's a bit of a lothario: one girl in most towns, and he's still claiming to be in love with the girl in Sydney. "I will tell her, you have all my love, but sex means nothing, you don't need all that," he says, hopefully. "No," we tell him.<br />
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After a brisk climb up two peaks, we are heading into the valley between the second and third; soon, we'll stop for lunch. But before lunch, on a break, Sinh mentions that sometimes the army comes up in these mountains for training. We ask him more about the army, and he gets agitated, says, "I don't like the government, the army. I think is very bad."<br />
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We aren't sure what to expect, but he loves to talk, so we urge him on.<br />
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"Sometimes, people very poor, have nothing. Government tells them to join the army, they get food. But maybe then they only get a bowl of rice, and then they have to stay for two years. The Party here [he meant the Communist Party], same as Party in China -- they don't care about the people. In northern Vietnam, there is an island that China says belongs to China and Vietnamese say belongs to Vietnam. But the Vietnamese people who protest, hold up signs, say "The island is ours!", the Vietnamese government have them put in prison, have them-" and here he makes quick motions with his hands, mimicking someone being<br />
beaten.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Communism helps everyone! Or else! Posters from Saigon.</i></span></div>
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"There was a man, who hold up a sign, and the army beat him. Then he write a song, asking "Who are you? Why do you beat me? Who am I? I love my country." The Party put him in prison." He looks off down the mountain for a minute.<br />
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"My father, he from South Vietnam. When I younger, I think "Viet Cong very good! I want to be Viet Cong like my father!" [the Viet Cong were also in Southern Vietnam, during the insurgency] But my father say no. He can't talk to me about history, because anybody who talk about history, who say bad things about the Party, they in big trouble, get arrested. But he say if I go think about it myself, he will maybe talk a little bit. So I learn and talk to people, and remember: the Party, they kill my grandfather, in South Vietnam. They put my father in prison, because he say bad things about Party. They put everyone in prison for talking, writing, singing, anything. Not allowed to talk. I love my country, but I don't want to join the army any more."<br />
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Nancy and I are staring at him, this 24-year old tour guide with a hint of a moustache, telling us something everyone in Vietnam knows: if you speak out against Communism, you will be arrested, or possible killed. The writer of songs? He has not been heard from. Nobody knows if he's actually in jail, or just...gone.<br />
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Later, climbing through yet more pine trees, he says, "The police lady, her father member of the Party. She have very big villa, new car. Maybe I will be boyfriend with her, marry her, I will get nice things too. Maybe I will end up joining the Party!" The turnaround, after he spent nearly an hour telling us the atrocities the Party commits, seems drastic. But he's also told us his family is very poor, his father, a war veteran, unable to work. "He have dreams at night, screaming and hitting out," Sinh says. "My mother crying, I am very scary." Probably the easy money of the Community regime seems like the only way out. But he is not allowed to join directly; he is from South Vietnam.<br />
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The American War is over. The North Vietnamese told everyone the GIs were here to starve their children, kill people, overturn every part of society that they valued. But now, Sinh tells us, many people are starving, and the Party members get the best jobs. Between watching your children go hungry and joining an oppressive regime, the choice seems obvious when half a pineapple at 45 cents is still too much for most people to pay.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Nancy and I smelled very bad when we made it to the top. </i></span></div>
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After a disgusting, clammy hike, we reach the summit -- 2167m, with a view of the green valleys below us. Towards Da Lat, we can see the roofs of vegetable greenhouses, and the women wearing long sleevs and traditional conical hats, hacking at the dirt with wooden hoes. On the other side, hills undulate to the distance, green with foliage. When we ask Sinh how to get back down, he shrugs and points.<br />
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"Only one way to go," he says.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-38501504213753776632012-03-10T06:08:00.002-08:002012-03-10T06:08:58.928-08:00Leaving this townIt sounds pretty trite and silly to say that everyone eventually has to do something they don't want to do, but heck, it's my blog. So deal with it.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, I left Perth indefinitely.<br />
<br />
Perth is a golden city in a lot of ways; I heard an English transit officer on the 2:15am McIver stop say it was "paradise on earth." Of course, he was saying it to an incredibly drunk, trashy-looking lady insisting that Australia was a terrible place because of what they did to the Aboriginals, so probably the next thing that happened was a fight. But Perth has amazing people and gorgeous beaches and delicious food that you sometimes don't even have to sell your body parts to eat. Perth is pretty great.<br />
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And so are the people. I think my time in Perth became a love song to the people I met -- not all of them, just the ones I like -- and it would be impossible to extricate my time in Australia from the people I loved. I met Jason at the end of February 2010, and left him yesterday. I met Sian my first day in Perth and can't imagine not seeing her again. As Nancy said to me today, "You know I'm obviously going to see you again, right?" I don't think I could have stood leaving if I thought I'd really never see anybody again. But if I think about it too much it makes me too sad to function, so I shouldn't think about it too much.<br />
<br />
On the bright side, at least I took my mind off everything by going to a museum about American war atrocities in the Vietnam War, that contained the words "imperialist Americans" and "totalitarian regime" (about the Americans). I think the theory was, I could distract myself from my emotional distress by looking at pictures of people being shot. So that's good. At least I haven't been doused in napalm.<br />
<br />
Also, I saw a magazine in the Kuala Lumpur airport called Cosmetic Surgery Magazine with the tagline "Because nobody's perfect". That sort of cheered me up a little bit, too, mostly because I thought it was a joke.<br />
<br />
Since I'm back on the road, for an indefinite time and going to unclear places, I figured it was high time I started updating this blog more regularly too, so you can hear about all the times I get afraid I've gotten Hepatitis. In case you were wondering, so far on this trip, it's been about five times and I only got here yesterday afternoon. Since then I've eaten unidentified rice paper rolls from a street vendor, had numerous drinks with ice in them, and eaten fresh basil. I figure I might as well embrace intestinal discomfort with fortitude; that way when it finally strikes, I'll get it all over at once.<br />
<br />Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-20138190878632162882011-11-16T20:00:00.001-08:002011-11-16T20:28:18.946-08:00I am a dangerous subversive threat<div style="text-align: left;">So, I've noticed something recently. Call me observant, say I'm attuned to subtle social interactions, but it has come to my attention that douchebags in utes like to shout at me when I'm cycling.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">I cycle at least a few times a week. Usually I cycle from my home in Cannington into the main Perth CBD, or from the Perth train station to West Perth or Osborne Park, or similarly not-very-impressive cycling paths. I'm definitely not one of those cyclists who wears padded spandex shorts decorated with sponsorship logos who goes 27km an hour. I am frequently lucky to reach 17km an hour. I have a ridiculous looking helmet (of course, all bike helmets are ridiculous-looking), and usually cycle with my mouth open because it is damn hard work, especially as LITERALLY EVERYWHERE I GO in Perth seems to be into the wind. No matter what time of day, no matter where I'm going, it's always INTO THE WIND. <a href="http://scroeser.net/">Sky</a> will probably agree with me on this one.<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CdqRo-WuYDs/TsSNE2lvilI/AAAAAAAAAgk/DX_JpDtHrWM/s1600/burningman3.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 132px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CdqRo-WuYDs/TsSNE2lvilI/AAAAAAAAAgk/DX_JpDtHrWM/s200/burningman3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675816544906480210" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">It's a good thing there aren't any cars at Burning Man, because I would be GETTING IN THEIR WAY.<br /></span></span></div><br />But my cycling makes me happy and it's excellent cardiovascular exercise and I enjoy being self-propelled. What I don't enjoy is the demographic of jerks who feel like they need to shout at me.<br /><br />I have not only been shouted at on my bicycle, mind you. Once I was walking from my house to the Cannington train station and some utebag (shortened from "douchebag in a ute") drove past and shouted "Freak!" out the window at me. I'm guessing because of my pink hair. Which is freakish indeed.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-908bFeVRduU/TsSMdoeQyZI/AAAAAAAAAgA/K6nzjkTtilM/s1600/_MG_6477.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 175px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-908bFeVRduU/TsSMdoeQyZI/AAAAAAAAAgA/K6nzjkTtilM/s200/_MG_6477.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675815871102110098" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Freak.</span></span></div><br />But the utebags who shout at me on my bicycle all say similar things, which amount, in translation to: "Hey, you there, lady on a bicycle! Why are you delaying me for an additional five minutes in my journey? You should remove yourself from my path!" Only ruder.<br /><br />The first few were some variation of the (always 20-to-30-year-old, always white, always male, always wearing a baseball cap, always driving a hotted up ute) utebag cry: "Get off the fucking road!" Usually when they shout this at me, I am cycling on the road because the footpath is full of pedestrians, and is furthermore not designated a bicycle path. Just so you know, if I ride on the footpath when it's not designated for bicycles, and a policeman sees me, and is feeling ungenerous, I will get a fine. Also, I ride to the far left of the road, closer than I should to the parked cars which could open a door and knock me off my bike at any moment.<br /><br />It was the most recent utebag that pissed me off enough to write this post. While cycling through Victoria Park, heading home, he drove past me (so obviously I wasn't actually in his way), and helpfully pointed out "There's a footpath right there." He was slightly past me when I helpfully pointed out "Fuck you," in response, although he must not have heard me, because he didn't say anything. That section of Albany Highway is always packed with traffic, and I saw his ute stalled in line several times before I actually not only pulled up beside him, but passed him. I was riding on the footpath at this point (no pedestrians, dual pathway), and noticed he was looking out the window at me, so I grinned and waved at him as I passed him.<br /><br />His response? "Get a real ride! And get on the footpath, you stupid bitch!"<br /><br />It was so obviously designed to be a personal attack, on me, the person riding this bicycle, who was DISOBEYING what he told me to do, that I found myself shaking as I was driving home. I remembered a story S. told me many years ago, when she was crossing a street at a pedestrian light, one of those ones that lets traffic go one way, then the other way, then all pedestrians can cross. She was walking through the intersection when a guy in a truck (whoa, surprise) made an illegal left turn through the intersection, on a red light (Australians, this is like making an illegal RIGHT turn...across traffic). He almost hit her. So she gave him the finger. He shouted something unintelligible at her and then drove away.<br /><br />Imagine her surprise, shock, and fear when she saw him WALKING TOWARDS HER along the sidewalk minutes later -- he had figured out which way she was going, circled the block, parked his car, and decided to get out to abuse and harass her. Calling her a "white bitch" and yelling swearwords at her, he kept advancing on her. It was actually remarkably fortunate that a friend of hers, a gigantic blacksmith who looks like a neo-Nazi but is actually adorable, happened to see the situation and came over to find out what was going on.<br /><br />But who grows to be an adult believing it is actually okay to personally insult someone in a public venue? Like the recent Twitter hashtag #mencallmethings, where female bloggers and activists report accounts of men trying to shut them down using organized "humorous" namecalling, it amazes me that anyone can get to a point in their lives where they are so entitled, so threatened, that they feel like it's not only okay, but the best course of action to insult someone they will literally never see again.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A0TVwxIZJAc/TsSMeFRgMeI/AAAAAAAAAgM/cDo5pTqRUCw/s1600/IMG_1217.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A0TVwxIZJAc/TsSMeFRgMeI/AAAAAAAAAgM/cDo5pTqRUCw/s200/IMG_1217.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675815878833222114" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Sad freak.<br /></span></span></div><br />He tried to intimidate me, tried to use verbal force to get me to do what he wanted, and he was so irrationally upset that I have no doubt he would have willingly gotten all up in my face and shouted about it some more. All because I was on a bicycle and following road rules.<br /><br />Oh and also: I was a lady. Don't forget that part.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-56167145627472579352011-11-01T21:37:00.000-07:002011-11-02T03:56:15.005-07:00Moving towards activism<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wc2NqKKyKjg/TrEgXybbPqI/AAAAAAAAAf0/en7sdfasQ_8/s1600/chogmprotest.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 134px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wc2NqKKyKjg/TrEgXybbPqI/AAAAAAAAAf0/en7sdfasQ_8/s200/chogmprotest.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670348998882049698" /></a>I have been doing a whole lot more activism-y type things lately. I marched to protest CHOGM -- well, not so much AGAINST CHOGM as FOR spending money on climate change awareness, renewable energy resources, and actual poor people, instead of, you know, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. I hung around at Occupy Perth and discussed anarchism, got shoved by a West Australian reporter (who called me a "fucking feral" when I told him to stop talking to me like a dickhead), and ate snacks. Snacks are an important part of activism. Snacktivism! You heard it here first.<div><br /></div><div>While I was hanging around at Occupy Perth, some quiet ladies were seriously painting away at some signs for the Reclaim the Night march that was due to happen that evening at 5pm. I'm all in favour of drawing awareness to, and working to end, violence against women. I think the feminist fight is NOT over and won, and that feminism is an issue that affects EVERYBODY -- you there? Guy who complains about how women get to have the door held open for them and expect their date to pay for them? You're a feminist too! You there, person who thinks that it's funny to ask lesbians what they do in bed together? You're...well, maybe you're not a feminist. You might just be a jerk.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, I have my reservations about the <a href="http://www.communities.wa.gov.au/Documents/Reclaim%20the%20Night%202011%20-%202.pdf">Perth Reclaim the Night</a> event, primarily because last year's was run by ROAR, a staunchly anti-man feminist activist collective, who were specifically transphobic about RTN last year (this year's also seems to have been run by ROAR, although they're calling themselves the Reclaim The Night Collective). Following a longstanding global tradition of "when I feel slightly less oppressed, my solution is to oppress others", ROAR <a href="http://www.wagenderproject.org/resources/transphobia_examples/roar_ahrc_submission_2010.pdf">banned trans people</a> from the event, claiming it was more important for people who had been identified BY SOMEONE ELSE as women, from birth, to feel safe. Cause, you know, identifying YOURSELF as a woman, despite being confusingly in the wrong body for how you identify, isn't scary and disheartening and needing of some support. Similarly, people who find themselves somewhere along the gender continuum, but have some woman in their identity -- those folks aren't welcome either. Never mind that EVERYONE can be against violence against women-identified people. </div><div><br /></div><div>When I posted on the RTN page on Facebook asking a very simple question, I got a roundabout, evasive answer. Let's see what I got:</div><div><blockquote><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><b>Claire Litton</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; "> asked: “hey there, are transwomen welcome at this event?”</span><br /><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><b>Kat Pinder</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; "> replied: “The organisers have not developed a particular position, other than the event is for women and children. Analysis’s of trans politics can be divisive, time consuming and often unlikely to reach consensus, so it is not something that we have even attempted to reach a decision about this year. I know some womyn who are attending who would not welcome male to trans people and differing perspectives on female to trans people. I am aware that trans identified people, who were raised as males, have attended the event last year and the previous year.”</span></blockquote></div><div>Interesting. That sounds to me like "we don't want to talk or think about this Very Important Issue so we haven't developed an Official Position on it, to avoid having anything in writing that says we DON'T like the trans people, but also that we DO." Many other Take Back The Night and Reclaim The Night rallies specifically include transwomen (who really should just be known as "women"), and it's a bit sad that these guys have kind of gone out of their way to not be inclusive...but not really be UNinclusive either. Guess they learned that lesson last year.</div><div><br /></div><div>I find it grating that she said trans politics are "divisive". You know what helps make them divisive? Creating arbitrary divisions between who you think should be allowed to call themselves "women". Just a thought. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am also unimpressed by how she sort of laid the "blame" at the feet of transwomen -- just so they know, "some womyn" attending have problems with MTF trans women, so, y'know, those transwomen should take that into account and be polite enough to stay home. So they don't offend their womyn compatriots. Who don't really want them there anyway. Because they're not women. They're men. Or something.</div><div><br /></div><div>And let's not even talk about "analysis's."</div><div><br /></div><div>I dislike any attempts to create a mysterious third gender consisting of all the "other" people, as we deem them. You're not a woman, MTF transwoman! You're a TRANS. You're not a man, FTM trans man! You're a TRANS. And you guys who have alternative gender identities, you don't really count at all.</div><div><br /></div><div>So after that answer, I was really unimpressed by the Reclaim The Night ideals, but was willing to see how events unfolded and maybe consider joining them if I felt comfortable and welcome, and that everyone was included.</div><div><br /></div><div>Until I saw the very serious quiet woman painting the following on her gigantic banner: PROSTITUTION = PAID RAPE. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now call me a crazy feminist ("Okay, you're a crazy feminist") but I'm gonna call Andrea Dworking and all the other ladies who subscribe to that whole all-sex-work-is-oppression-and-by-the-way-any-hetero-sex-is-rape-because-penises-are-evil CRAZY FEMINISTS. Okay, maybe they're not crazy. But they're sure taking any form of agency and choice away from the women for whom they claim to speak, the women they claim to empower.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some sex workers, which include prostitutes, are oppressed. Some office workers are oppressed. Some sex workers are in the sex industry against their will, through coercion. Some women become doctors against their will, through coercion. Implying that women who choose to be in the sex industry for their own reasons are doing it because they are sadly deluded or forced is patronizing, misogynistic, rude, and disempowering.</div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, implying that a rape survivor's experience is in any way similar to what a prostitute experiences is deeply patronizing to a rape survivor. A sex worker has a choice about who she sleeps with. A rape survivor doesn't. A sex worker frequently acts like she enjoys it. A rape survivor doesn't. A sex worker uses condoms (and in some places, is required by law to both use condoms and dental dams, and get mandatory regular testing). A rape survivor doesn't usually have that option. Cheapening the experience of a rape survivor by saying it's "same-same" with sex work is shameful.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, Reclaim The Night Collective, whoever you are, because I couldn't find anywhere on any literature anything about who you actually were, you faceless entity -- bad show. You are presenting a space where YOU are the ones who get to choose what being a woman means. Must be nice for you.</div><div><br /></div><div>(Also, just as a disclaimer, I am a cis-woman myself, and I have attempted to use language in a way that gets my point across without implying divisivenes. I hate using "transman" and "transwoman" instead of just "man" and "woman" but I felt like it was necessary in the context of trying to explain why I was pissed off.)</div><div><br /></div><div></div>Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-38943133110677005932011-05-29T02:50:00.000-07:002011-05-29T02:54:55.210-07:00Not a long postBut a quote, found on the literary tattoo website <a href="http://contrariwise.org/">Contrariwise</a>, and a quote from Whitman I've oddly never heard before. I'm not as well read as I used to be, and haven't picke dup a classic work of literature in years (am I blowing my cover?), but this quote resonates with me in so many ways:<br /><br /><blockquote>“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”<br /></blockquote><br />This is from <span style="font-style: italic;">Leaves of Grass</span>, but it was apparently only ever published in the first edition and in no other editions. A shame, because it seems like the best possible life motto.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-44185730444303808022011-05-16T03:47:00.001-07:002011-05-16T04:27:22.598-07:00The words of life<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VehGQthSYaA/TdEIcTIeCxI/AAAAAAAAAa4/gSJ47j7WwBo/s1600/IMG_0992.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VehGQthSYaA/TdEIcTIeCxI/AAAAAAAAAa4/gSJ47j7WwBo/s200/IMG_0992.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607272293318134546" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:78%;">It would be good if life actually had warning signs like this, wouldn't it? Instead, we get stupid ones like "Don't Walk" or "Danger: Cliff", which actually, now that I think of it, are pretty good warning signs.<br /></span></span></div><br />They say that the sense you use the most when you're remembering things is your sense of smell (now, who "they" are and why they keep saying things that we take at face value, I don't know) -- and certainly nothing brings back a sense of BEING in a memory like a smell. It's not like looking at the picture of my mom and I hand in hand in the driveway of our old townhouse; I look at the picture and it jogs faint impressions, of the babysitter I had when we lived there who let me watch Happy Days and the movie "Bloodsport" which I claimed for a long time was my favorite movie because I was nine years old and my hippie mother had never let me see anything with violence in it before so I naturally assumed that anything forbidden was AWESOME and I still vaguely believe Jean-Claude van Damme is sort of cool just for that reason.<br /><br />But let me get a particular smell and it SMACKS me back into my grandmother's driveway in August, in Hartford, CT, in my little-girl clothes, when I decided I was going to be altruistic and give all my toys away to the neighborhood kids, so I left them all on everybody's doorsteps and then instantly regretted it, and went crying to my mom so we could go get them back. I liked those bears. Or a dry sandy smell places me on a rooftop in Morocco in 1999, desperately in love with Wolf and the newness of everything.<br /><br />Music, and particular songs, do that for me as well. Now, I am kind of a musical weirdo. I rarely buy or download new music, even by bands I really like, and happily allow my iPod to shuffle its way through the 17 days of music I already have loaded into it, skipping the approximately 6 days of which are bellydancing music. The kind of music I like leans towards clever or monstrously sad lyrics, acoustic guitar, and Canadian lesbian acts (that's you, Tegan and Sara!), and I happily accept recommendations from people who are cooler and more vastly connected with music than me: like my ex-crush who used to be a radio DJ, and <a href="http://pantslock.com/">Arlette</a>, who is just cooler in general than basically everyone on earth, and also funnier.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JpUADbQ381g/TdEIc6q_9AI/AAAAAAAAAbI/Yr_2wBQfoHQ/s1600/IMG_1335.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JpUADbQ381g/TdEIc6q_9AI/AAAAAAAAAbI/Yr_2wBQfoHQ/s200/IMG_1335.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607272303931945986" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:78%;">This is the kind of joy Arlette gives me: the kind I want to write about on garbage bins.<br /></span></span></div><br />But every now and then, a particular song swims up on my iPod and it just brings me right back to a place, or a person.<br /><br />I was massively ambivalent about leaving LA: on the one hand, I was finally allowed to LEAVE LA, which gnawed metaphorically on my heart like an apathetic, laidback zombie. On the other, I was going away from some very good friends, and a boyfriend (which actually turned out to be a pretty good move). But I was torn, and on my last night before flying out of the country, I found myself at home alone for a short time, while packing the gigantic piles of stuff I had strewn over the living room (have you ever tried to pack to move to another country where you can only take what fits into your checked luggage on a trip to Thailand?).<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EoVoHvEFALU/TdEIcrZdbFI/AAAAAAAAAbA/R9uF2qu_444/s1600/IMG_1076.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EoVoHvEFALU/TdEIcrZdbFI/AAAAAAAAAbA/R9uF2qu_444/s200/IMG_1076.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607272299831848018" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Water makes everyone introspective, particularly feet,<br /></span></span></div><br />And while I was at home, I found myself playing The Weakerthans "Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure" over and over again. Now, this is The Saddest Song Ever, but sad in a satisfying way, and the lyrics are just heartbreaking, so of course I LOVE IT and I found myself singing along to it over and over again, with tears in my eyes. Hearing that song now brings me back to the tiny office room and living room of that pool house in the San Fernando Valley, which I can picture almost exactly, with every decoration intact, and the empty dusty shelves that used to hold my clothes.<br /><br />Similarly, They Might Be Giants "We Want A Rock" ("Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads...") immediately plops me into Colleen's tiny Smarte car convertible, driving down Highway 1 to the Pacific Coast Highway from Camarillo, under a cloudy sky, with the top down. She and Peter were crazy enough to get me to housesit for them while they went to Australia for their honeymoon, and I totally had a wild party every night and sold drugs and made pornography movies and snorted cocaine through a hundred dollar bill. But when I wasn't doing that, I fed their cats and drive Colleen's car to the beach and enjoyed being alone in a remote area, and actually felt the first smidgeon of affection for California as a location, rather than a movie set.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CWB_TGE7E9c/TdEIcL32i4I/AAAAAAAAAaw/L18x4_eWsL0/s1600/IMG_0857.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CWB_TGE7E9c/TdEIcL32i4I/AAAAAAAAAaw/L18x4_eWsL0/s200/IMG_0857.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607272291369388930" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">My Honda. I miss the bumper stickers. A lot. More than the weird rattling noise it made.<br /></span></span></div><br />The Magnetic Field's "All My Little Words", despite having been given to me as part of an attentively-constructed song playlist by an elegant paleontologist I had a giant affection for, actually reminds me of driving again: driving between Christy's house in the hills above Boulder, CO and town itself, passing along the winding roads in the sun, with the trees surrounding me, and the music blasting from the speakers of my old Honda Accord (sold for $750 to a teenager who I think was stoned, bumper stickers and all). I was excited because I was helping a camp get ready for Burning Man, and because mountains are awesome, and because I got to sleep in the tiny cottage with the gigantic Tempurpedic bed ALL BY MYSELF.<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BcmGjjHudOg/TdEIb27LEmI/AAAAAAAAAao/ulAgdA3Rt2M/s1600/IMG_0752.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BcmGjjHudOg/TdEIb27LEmI/AAAAAAAAAao/ulAgdA3Rt2M/s200/IMG_0752.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5607272285746172514" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">It didn't hurt that Christy's neighborhood looked like this.<br /></span></span></div><br />"La Famiglia" by Mirah, a light-hearted and delicate song about boning, reminds me of staying at Reed's house in the Presidio, sunset lowering over San Francisco. James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" brings back both the heady rush of loving someone that turned out to be a self-centred egotistical asshole and the tears that trickled down my face as I remembered him, flying home from Biloxi, MS with Beth after teaching a dance workshop, looking out into the dark mile high air so she wouldn't see me crying and ask what was wrong.<br /><br />What are your songs? The soundtrack of your lives?Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1596971270649491694.post-91758774500950016572011-04-08T05:16:00.000-07:002011-04-08T05:46:56.335-07:00Major difference in cultural points<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-632sobCX5H8/TZ8DHWRLEdI/AAAAAAAAAag/wIbsgdU0LS4/s1600/353400-winners-and-losers.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-632sobCX5H8/TZ8DHWRLEdI/AAAAAAAAAag/wIbsgdU0LS4/s200/353400-winners-and-losers.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593192686989021650" border="0" /></a><br />So, since coming to Australia, I watch a lot more tv. This is due to several factors -- my old housemates watched tv in the evenings, Jason loves having the tv on, I've lost the will to fight about it as much as I did when I was 22, and there are actually sometimes shows on that I want to watch.<br /><br />One of these, a recent Australian production, is called "Winners and Losers", and is a night-time dramedy about 4 deliberately quirky friends who were outsiders in high school ("losers") and then meet up again at their 10th reunion to kick ass and show the bitchy Queen Bee (described by one of my coworkers as being "almost American") who they are...namely, they are WINNERS! The plot twists are deeply improbable; for example, they become actual winners when they buy a lottery ticket, and are each the recipient of $2 million -- at the end of the first episode. How am I supposed to identify with that? I was definitely not the coolest of kids in high school, although I never saw any stratification of the type common to Lindsay Lohan movies, so I was doing all right with my "amen, sister!" until they won a ton of money and then I immediately could not sympathize with their problems anymore ("Oh, you can't set a date for your wedding? Boo fucking hoo, YOU HAVE A YACHT!!")<br /><br />One part of this show that made me almost drop-jawed in amazement was a scene near the middle of the first episode (and the episodes go for indeterminate amounts of time...the first one was about 2 hours long, while the second was one and a half hours long, and the third was about 45 minutes. Maybe they're using up all the story early?). The four girls all have definable traits, and one of them is the Hot Brunette. She's also the Only Brunette, since Australians are OBSESSED with blondes in the same way Americans are obsessed with redheads. But Hot Brunette is a personal trainer, which is how she lost all the weight that made her a loser in high school, and to deal with her nerves at the reunion, where she teeters in on improbably high heels and a sexy tight-as-skin dress, she pops into the nearest bathroom stall (see if you can tell what's going to happen), takes a COMPACT MIRROR out of her bag, TIPS SOME COCAINE out onto it, and SNIFFS it with an audible snort!!<br /><br />Australians: take a minute to imagine the amazement of my American compatriots, who, even now as they read, are probably staring at each other saying, "You can SHOW that on AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC TELEVISION?" Americans: this wasn't even cable. This was a channel that everybody gets. And the show airs at 8:30, which is actually within the kids-are-awake window of prime-time programming.<br /><br />I tell you what, I was floored. And then, in the next episode, she answers the door to a couple of police officers WITH A PLATE OF COCAINE IN HER HAND. And they arrest her. And then SHE'S ALLOWED OUT ON BAIL. With a fine. A fine! They have not revealed on the show how much her fine will be, but I looked up drug laws online, to help curtail my amazement (thinking, "Well, it's got to be like $50,000"), and discovered that anything up to 2 grams is okay, with a fine of up to $2000 if they catch you and are in a bad mood.<br /><br />Stop to imagine the cultural divide, here. More like a cultural yawning gulf, with dudes in helicopters with uzis patrolling the borders of it. Not only would you never see drug use on American non-cable channels unless it was in the form of a cautionary tale ("Tiffany started out as a perfectly normal, happy eight year old...until she took ONE PUFF of a marijuana cigarette. Now she's a streetwalking whore doing gang bangs for crack."), but it would never be a trait of a sympathetic main character. And if you got arrested for holding a plate of cocaine in front of police officers, you could make damn sure you would not be let out with a fine and a slap on the hand from a magistrate, who I always picture as portly red-faced men in wigs and waistcoats. You would go directly to jail, do not pass go, and you might get out in a couple of years after you had become the bitch of several men with THUG LIFE tattooed on their foreheads.<br /><br />This is how badly our ridiculous War on Drugs has screwed up our nation. Drugs are not necessarily bad in and of themselves; just what people do when they're on them and addicted to them, and in my opinion, alcohol is the worst of all of them. Have you ever been aggressed on the street by someone who'd just finished smoking pot? Now how about some dudes outside a bar at 2am? Which one is more likely to punch you and which one is more likely to take your corn chips and give you a hug? And alcohol is the legal one.<br /><br />Sometimes I don't remember I'm a foreigner until something like that happens, and my mind gets completely blown.<br /><br />PS In other news, one of the guys I work with told me about a hilarious practice he and his friends engage in called "stealth bumming", where you wait for someone to be doing something that involves them bending over, then you sneak in and pretend to be pounding them in the ass ("bumming" them, in British) while someone takes a picture. Then you post it on Facebook. Perhaps thisisphotobomb.com should change their name to thisisphotoBUMMING.com. If only.Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06401697942402052974noreply@blogger.com1