happiness

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just bought tickets for morocco. i’ll be going at the beginning of september, too late to see my friend abdu’s wedding but i can still stay with another friend and see the new couple. they are both from fes, in the north. i’ll stay at said’s house, with his mother and family. the ticket was expensive but i realized that it is an opportunity i would be crazy to turn down.

looking for pictures to of fes it finally started to feel real to me, that i would be in that place. morocco has been a magic world to me for the last ten years, and now because of my friends’ generosity i have the chance to walk through the mirror.

the timing is good because it means i can feel again how i did as a child, the approaching fall bringing mystery and adventure.

i can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of that golden door.

i've been lazy

so, in the last two weeks the important things that have happened are:

went to boston on business, which was a blast. an interview only takes an hour and we were there for seven, so we spent the extra time walking around cambridge and over the bridge to boston, ate italian food in a cute little restaurant. the table tops in the restaurant were paintings on multiple layers of glass. it gave the scenes an illusion of depth. i describe this because it was interesting, not because it was cool. net effect was kitsch. the waitress had a bostonian/italian-american accent and was very blonde. then interview, then shopping, and finally local beers on a terrace looking out over the water. work should be like this more often.

also, will hopefully be getting a press pass soon. this is a sign that my boss was serious about giving me more responsibility. responsibility means work, but it looks like it’s going to be interesting work.

the small thing that’s made me most happy this week was walking home from work yesterday. i brought one of those paper chinese umbrellas as a sun umbrella in the morning, but when i was walking home it started raining lightly. the sound of the rain on the waxed paper, crisp popping, was a sheer delight.

stranger in a strange land

had my physical therapy appointment today. this damn arm just kills me. so anyway, there i was being electrically stimulated, which i complain about but secretly enjoy, watching my hand jump and twitch without my control.

there was an older woman across the room from me, one of those ones who probably doesn’t have enough people to talk to in her normal life. she needed to fill the empty space with sound. this reminds me of the song by uncle bonsai, describing a certain type of man:

just like the marching bands they heard as boys, they need to make some noise

to prove they’re there

anyway, this lady wanted to know if i knew anything about crystals. well now, i’m from boulder colorado. and i did spend a couple years hanging around a hippie new age store as a child. so i told this lady that she shouldn’t wear her new quartz crystal bracelet, and that she should wash it in distilled water and leave it in the sun for a day to cleanse it of strangers’ energy. this is very good advice, exactly what the people at the hippie store would say. except, of course, i don’t believe a word.

got me to thinking about all the people i have been in my life. of course there is a consistent thread, the profound draw to the alien, in both the science fiction and immigration and naturalization services senses. but there are people i have been in the past still with me in my head, and some of them i barely recognize. what was i doing in that new age shop? for that matter, what am i doing hanging out in an egyptian coffee shop now?

will this i, too, become an unrecognizable stranger?

patriotism

Went to see the fireworks from Queens on Independence Day. It was fun to be in the crowd that gathered in the street, all the different languages, packs of children sitting on the roofs of cars to get a better look. I was there with a friend of mine, a Moroccan, who will be taking his oath as a US citizen in a few more months. After all that’s happened, it’s a relief that he still wants to. He told me that democracy rests on having many choices, so he plans to join the Green party. More power to him, I say.
Every year I make it a point to sing America the Beautiful, first AND second verses. Most people don’t seem to know the second one, so here it is:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

I like the acknowledgment that as a nation we have flaws. And that it is patriotic to go about fixing them. That’s an attitude sadly missing from the consciousnesses of some people whose names we won’t mention.

Wonder what it would take to change the national anthem?

more seedpods

two days ago i spent a half an hour on the phone with a member of the ku klux klan. i had called to set up an interview with him, and when he called me back, he seemed to want to chat.

i had spent some time earlier in the day looking at lynching photos, so i was surprised by how pleasant this guy was. especially since, after some conversation, it came out that he thought i was chinese. oh, that sneaky last name of mine!

he asked me to reassure the japanese reporter who is going to interview him. “i know she might be a little nervous coming down here to meet with a white supremacist. but we’ve got something called southern hospitality.”

then i went online this morning and had a good conversation with an internet café owner in baghdad that i chat with sometimes. there weren’t any power outages today, so it was a nice long talk. apparently there’s no running water anywhere in baghdad right now, because somebody blew up a treatment center. but he said that, after things are safer there, i should come visit.

they’ve got something called iraqi hospitality.