seed pods

sitting on the train today, reading my book. it’s a book of arabic grammar, so i was looking at it and kind of talking to myself, reading things aloud. i figure, i might as well be the weird one on the train if no-one else is gonna step up to the plate.
but this guy stood next to me in the door, looked down, and said “it’s not that bad, you know. once you learn the forms of the verbs it’s easy.” and when i looked up at him, puzzled, he said “i was a muslim for 15 years, but then i got mad at god. the religion is fine. it was god i couldn’t take.”

and then he got off the train.

i was sad i had to go to work, because that was a conversation i wanted to continue.

sometimes i forget that all these people i curse for stopping at the head of the stairs when I am trying to make it down them in time to catch the train that is tantalizingly just sitting there, or whose drippy umbrellas rub up against my legs and send a trickle of rain into my shoes, or who just put their heads against the subway pole and sleep, all these people; they are three dimensional and miraculous. they’re the seed pods i played with as a child, smooth on the outside, but if you peel them open a profusion of hairs and tiny seed grains, infinite complexity, spills out into your hand.

quakers say there is that of god in every person. i think real religion is the capacity to see it, to respond to it. to call it out.

purpose

i find that looking at jellyfish goes a long way toward convincing me that no matter how horrible things are, everything is still fundamentally all right. their hypnotic movements make your mind move slowly, and the astounding alien beauty of them keeps you from looking away. it is a never-ending comfort to me that i was created by the same things that shaped the world and all these stunning creatures.

a while ago i was listening to alan watts, a philosopher, and something he said struck me as especially wonderful. even if you don’t believe in god, or a sentient creator, the fact remains that the forces that keep the galaxies and planets in motion are active on a much smaller scale right here. the same patterns that fuel the stars are responsible for your presence here. you are made of the same stuff. so forget god. what's important is that in you, the universe has produced a part of itself that is capable of looking back at the whole, and appreciating it in its entirety.

i think that if we have a moral obligation to do anything, that’s it. to take responsibility for our own eyes and our own intellect. to be appreciative. to be awake. what else is consciousness good for?

unbelievable

Sometimes things are too strange and wonderful to believe.
a twelve year old girl was kidnapped by seven men who wanted to force her to marry one of them. in ethiopia, apparently kidnapping, beating, and even rape are used to coerce women into marriage. but when the group of men began beating her, three lions emerged from the forest and drove them away, guarding the girl until her relatives and the police came for her. the situation they put this girl in is horrifying, but with the ending it sounds like an old fairy tale, before the darkness was taken out of them.

i love the image of rare ethiopian lions swooping down on a group of men, with their black manes and fiery eyes. the policeman who found her said, "they stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest."

let’s hope that people in this area are superstitious enough to think that she is under the lions’ protection. no one would dare touch her again.

this makes me even more excited for the show i am going to see tonight.

my leisure pastime

other than watching stupid japanese television, that is.






i had to stop going to my regular place in queens, so i bought my own shisha and now i smoke it on my roof. kicking back and looking out over the park as the curls of scented smoke drift around me, it is a real escape. now, when i say looking over the park i should clarify that it’s not THAT park, and also that it isn’t really next door. i ain’t that rich! but you can see green things from my roof. it looks like this:






on the other side you can see the empire state and the chrysler buildings, but only their tips.

when i’m feeling especially flush, i put white wine in the base. the flavor of the smoke is especially good with cherry and rose, and white wine and ice in the bottom. the wine adds depth and the cherry adds sweetness.

it makes me happy to have habits that are traceable to a traveling experience or a person i don’t see often. with the shisha, i can call up ghosts along with the smoke.

i work in an icebox

the receptionist's desk at my office


ok, not really.

but the place is extremely cold, year-round. all winter it was okay. i had a sweater and a blanket to put over my lap. but clearly, summer in this office means that it’s time to break out a hat and gloves. there’s something so irritatingly uneconomical, not to mention piss poor for the environment, about needing to use a space heater in june to counteract the air conditioning. looks like i’ll have to move back to japan.

the kingdom of heaven is at hand

when i first saw a trailer for it, i remember thinking that it looked like an ill-timed joke. then i read this article by robert fisk. this marks the first time i’ve been moved to tears by a description of people watching a movie. it’s rare to come across something so hopeful written about the middle east, unless it’s written by some terminally irritating bush apologist like david brooks or thomas friedman. but fisk is no apologist for anyone, including the status quo in the countries that he has spent his adult life living in and reporting on. 29 years in lebanon would make a pessimist out of anybody. plus, he’s british.
in my conversations with my muslim friends, they constantly emphasize the historical tolerance for other faiths in the islamic empire. while i’ve found many evangelical sites debunking the stories my friends tell, isn’t it significant that these muslims, in this time, want to see mercy and tolerance for others in their history? for all the hyperventilating in certain circles, i’d sooner give my back to a moderate muslim than a fundamentalist christian.

go broncos!

can’t believe that i made fun of football players for all those years. reggie rivers is articulate and absolutely, spot-on-the-nose, dead right. i’m so proud that he played for my state! for that annoying and noisy blue-and-orange themed bunch of thick-necked hunks of beef that always used to interrupt shows i really wanted to watch, like, say, the “ spock gets married ” episode for the 10th time.
how wrong i was! and no, i don’t mean about star trek. it was and remains a brilliant show.

easy astral travel through boredom

although my job involves many things, the one that takes up the most time is transcribing interviews from audio tape. these tapes are full of information on dealings in the financial world, real estate companies, the intricacies of offshore insurance agencies and the tax regimes that support them. it is, for a photography and creative writing major, profoundly boring. the nice thing is that though i have to listen carefully and type exactly what i hear, i don’t have to listen with active attention. this leaves the consciousness free to go traveling.

i highly recommend repetitive tasks like transcription to recover memories… for me it only goes back to things that happened in my late teens, but i am constantly reliving brief stretches of long forgotten experiences. for the first couple of months, i wrote them all down, but that became exhausting, so now i just make little notes when a memory is especially strong.

maybe i should post a list.

i cause nothing but trouble

well, the other day i went on a walk with a moroccan hot dog seller who works near my office, to the garage for his cart, talking in french about religion, mostly.

and then two days later his wife told me, and him, off. i'm no longer supposed to speak to him.

so she was angry, and i was apologizing to her in my flustered french, and he was apologizing to me. what a mess.

the funny part is, i was very happy that he was married, because then there could be no misunderstanding between him and me about what was possible from the relationship.

as my boyfriend rachid said once of a problem, it's like harira. a big jumble, with everything thrown in.

on the bright side i took this picture that afternoon.

conundrum

so here's the difficulty. i lived in Japan for 4 years, and in that time i made many friends. i sought out the people who didn't seek me out. it's exhausting to be hunted as the "trophy foreigner," the prop to be showed off to real friends. so if people i didn't know approached me, i was immediately suspicious that this was someone in the market for free english lessons and perhaps an introduction to an American boyfriend.
oh, how old prejudice comes to bite you in the ass.

because i find myself thinking, isn't it ridiculous to live in new york city and have not even one black friend? how can I know new york if i have no meaningful interaction with a group that makes up a third of this city's population?

but if i go out of my way looking for a friend based on the qualification of race, what does that make me?

crap. moving to japan cured me of exoticizing asians, because i am too used to them. spending a couple of years looking at almost nothing but asian faces, and i finally extinguished the little light that used to go off in my brain, that blinked "other" or "foreigner" at me and prevented me from seeing asian people for who they are instead of where they're from.

so perhaps immersion is, again, the answer? should i move to harlem? or is this the annoying liberal's dilemma, so obsessed with eradicating internal racism that the very desire becomes another form of putting distance between myself and everybody else?

one of my friends in japan, when i pointed out the various nationalities of the group that we were sitting with, (something along the lines of "isn't it cool that we have all the continents represented?") replied that he hadn't noticed.

"why are americans so fucked up about race and nationality?" he asked.

good question.