Oops!

Only the third day in, and I already missed a day. The reason: I was so irritable for the first half of the day that Everything Single Thing felt like sandpaper. Then Anja and I took a 6-mile hike with the intensity and fervor of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Then I was pretty much incoherent for the rest of the evening. Today, I shall do better.

This Poem Comes to Me This Time of Year

Perhaps it's cheating, but today's post is a poem by Helen Pinkerton, c. 2002

Nature Note: The California Poison Oak

Dry summers flaw the leaf to a rose flame
Where, as a vine, it seems to flicker higher
Than live-oaks it consumes, or where it leaps
As a free-standing shrub or tree—ablaze
In wild-oat hay fields. Yet, with winter come,
The stems shrink back and almost disappear
In sinuous tangles, while a few white drupes
That look like snowberries hang to trick the eyes.

Nothing will warn but old experience
The ignorant damp hand that comes to dig
In winter rain the dormant trillium:
Seeking to bring a wild spring beauty home
It finds, as parasitic as a drug,
Pain stinging flesh that brushed the stems but once.

Fun-a-Day

Last year for Fun-a-Day I did an Explore-a-Day, and then printed out photos of my explores and fastened them to some grape stakes along with some words written onto tea-dyed gift tags. It turned out okay. Mom did Leaf-a-Day, wherein she pressed a leaf or leaves each day, then mounted them on paper and made a mobile. It was cool.

This year, Mom is doing Recipe-a-Day, in which she is rewriting her recipes onto new cards. She's quite exercised by the whole idea, and had it planned months ago. I, on the other hand, just figured out that in the interest of writing, a skill I fear I am losing (if I ever had it, really) I am going to do a Post-a-Day. I don't know if anyone will read them, but that's not the point.

So, random thought for New Year's Day: as I listen to my various public radio podcasts, I keep hearing a sponsorship message about the new Chevrolet Volt, with the tagline, "It's More Car Than Electric." My reaction, every single time is, "No, it's not."

I like this person's take on the slogan: "Maybe 'The electric car you can just put gas in on those days when you’re not giving a crap about the environment' was too long."

Kurgan-Teppa, Part One

Maybe it's strange to have waited so many months to write about my trip, but I was in Tajikistan in May and June, and it was...fairly indescribable. Therefore, describing it? Difficult.

Kurgan-Teppa is also spelled Qurghonteppa or Kurganteppa. Or Қурғонтеппа in Tajik. Formerly known as Курган-Тюбе (Kurgan-Tyube) in Soviet times. Don't ask where my particular hyphenated spelling comes from, because I don't actually know.

We drove through the city, then south, past mixed flocks of sheep and goats being herded along the road, over hills green as Scotland ("Fuck Scotland," I said), where men, women, and children used scythes to cut the grass, laying down another shade of green in squares and rectangles, sometimes on improbable slopes that seemed to threaten to dump the harvesters off into the valleys.

The grass packed on donkeys, or on bicycles, or in the trunks and backseats of cars, or piled onto square two-wheeled metal wagons, pulled by horses, or donkeys, or men, or boys. Mud towns, with corrugated tin roofs, in the distance or, twice or three times, surrounding the two-lane highway. The highway like a road and a farm road and a trail and a sidewalk all at once. The towns all shades of cream and ivory and tan and light brown, with the women's gowns and scarves flashes of color, vivid and strange.


A choikhana with tapchans on both sides of a small steep arroyo, seemingly advertising itself with a few abandoned tent frames over empty tapchans, set a hundred meters before the real teahouse.

In a village, a whole empty bazaar, with concrete-and-tin stalls and frames for sun shades, and tables and places for tables. Is it a weekly bazaar? Does it fill up? Or is there nothing to sell; does everything get sent on to the capital?

At a curve in the road, a line of brightly-dressed (always brightly-dressed) women, each sitting at a little table, each displaying the same small selection of sodas and snacks. Why there? And how does one choose which woman, that day, will take one's money?

A mural on the face of the road cutting, with an eagle and a deer and some nature. Very fetching, but what is it meant to tell us?

We get to Kurgan-Teppa, and pass a tractor--old, spare, awesone--on a pedestal, backed by a park with a collection of arching white cement pieces making a vaguely half-egg-shaped dingus. A monument to the greatness of the TRACTOR, a monument to nothing, as I have only seen the fields being worked by hand, groups of men, women, and children using hoes and shovels, stooping or crouching, working acres by hand, all by hand, the stupidest use of human labor imaginable. While at the moment what appears to be the only thing that the Industrial Revolution did to really, materially, improve people's lives is to make a tractor. Then make tractors.



No fuel? No parts? Just no damn tractors? What's the issue? That would be my NGO: Get the People Tractors. Give them a fuel allowance. Train tractor mechanics. Smuggle in the parts or pay the bribes and keep doing it over and over and over because each hour of working the fields by hand is another hour without rest, literacy, or (so I imagine, barreling by in our fancy Lada Niva four-wheel drive) hopefulness.

Dogtiredness.

Never mind. Tractors can't take away dogtiredness and no doubt the hours freed from the fields would be focused anew, to new back-breaking chores.

Neal Stephenson writes that, "In the real world--Planet Earth, Reality--there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s." That's the choice. I have other choices but my place is so privileged that the spot I take up cannot be doubled. The only way to free my spot would be for me to leave that spot, which I cannot do, because even were I to become a Tajik fieldhand, I would still carry my place of privilege with me; I would be choosing to act downtrodden.



Only when I die will my place be empty, but when that happens, that place will not be available to a Tajik fieldhand. No, it'll go to a nice infant, born of Western parents in a clean Western hospital. Maybe being born in a place with modern sanitation is the initiating mark of privilege. Maybe clean water and disinfectants are the baptismal fluids, holy, altering.

I Felt a Feeling, and I Told You with Punctuation Marks

Last week, I got a message on this dating website where I have a profile. I don't know why I keep the profile on there. Maybe because I think I might want to meet someone in the future. I certainly couldn't be bothered now. Anyway, the message was...okay-ish. But then I read the guy's profile and under the "I’m really good at" section, he had included "oral sex."

Here was my (not very nice) reply:

"Dear Gene Simmons,

I was considering your proposal semi-positively, until I read your profile and saw your claim of oral sexual prowess. I see you have removed that reference, but the damage has been done. I no longer, nor have I really ever, spent any time with people who want to talk about sex unless they are actually having it (though wordlessness is often better even then), or who would talk about how good they are at it in a public profile.

Also, just so you know, not all women even enjoy said activity.

Reading your profile unfortunately made me feel a bit soiled, and I will be too busy taking multiple Silkwood showers to ever be able to leave the house again.

Sincerely,
Blaize"

He responded with a combination of passive-aggression and aggression-aggression, and a couple of insults followed by a repeated invitation that we do something together. While strange, this reaction didn't bother me, because I figured I had gotten what I deserved. What DID bother me was his repeated use of ;^D

Putting ;^D after calling someone crazy and a prude; what's that supposed to MEAN? "You're crazy and a prude! Winky nosy big smile!"

My reply to the the message, and his reply to that, all occurred during work, and this is why I love my work: my coworkers decided to enact the winky nosy smile In Real Life, and this is what we got:



Inevitably, this led to the recreation of other emoticons. I hope you enjoy the following.

X-)



o__o



D: (Two versions)





>:)



The ever-popular :(



And finally :-D

What to Do in Istanbul

1. Get frustrated by being sent back and forth along the ferry wharf.

2. Find the right ticket booth/dock.

3. Take the Boğazçi Özel Gezi ferry towards Anadolu Kavağı.

4. Sit next to a nice Turkish couple, on the shady side of the lower deck. It'll mean you see the European side only, but you can't have everything.


5. Get off at Sarıyer.

6. Figure out where the staircases go up the hill and follow them until they peter out in people's private yards.


7. Make an error in choosing a restaurant, and possibly drink from the hose.* (Uncertain as of yet.)

8. Fall into conversation with a young German-educated graphic designer with dyed blond hair and excellent English.

9. Stand on the stoop of his house, which 100 years ago went right to the water, whence the residents traveled in boats, though now it is separated from the water by a road.


10. Discuss Venice, protests in Iran, and one's own potential ability to protest even at the risk of one's life. (Positive, on his side, uncertain to negative on mine. Americans are lazy.)

11. Walk back along the waterfront, photographing the abandoned and inhabited Ottoman-era houses.


12. Go to the Sadberk Hanım Museum.

13. Be awestruck and, later, fatigued by the collection.

14. Buy a present in the gift shop of a coffee cup with an Iznik tile design of a felucca.

15. Catch the 25E bus back toward town.

16. Realize one could get off at any stop, walk around two hours, and return a better person for it.

16a. Have a fleeting fantasy of buying an abandoned Ottoman-era house and repairing it.

17. Have a (fairly handsome) Turkish guy stare at you, even when you stare right back at him for half a minute.

18. Feel weirdly flattered, then self-conscious.

19. Feel sardonic when he, his wife, and kid get off the bus, and you realize that--young-looking as he is--he has a pot-belly.

19a. Skip steps 17-19 if you are not available to such flirtation.

20. Get back to Sirkeci.

21. Pet some cats.


22. Drink tea under a grape arbor while watching an ear-splitting game of Turkish backgammon played between an old bald man in a short-sleeved shirt and Windsor-knotted striped ugly tie, and a younger old guy with a beard wearing a technical vest like a photojournalist, watched by a mild fellow in a blue t-shirt, all three bespectacled.



23. Have the tea be free, because Turks are friendly, or at least these Turks, and you are being rewarded for watching the game. "Turkish culture," the bearded man says, "Have a nice life." "Thank you. You, too," you reply, and mean it.

24. Overall believe you have dodged the hose.

25. Get ready to fall asleep at the sunset prayer hour, because sunset is at almost 9 o'clock, and 3 a.m., the shuttle to the airport, and the almost full day of travel home, is far too soon.

*A phrase used by Ray and Anya to indicate iffy dietary behavior in foreign lands.

My Salad Days, When I Was Green in Judgement, Cold in Blood

I've been going through boxes of papers, dating back all the way to high school, but mostly consisting of my graduate school work. So, I find notes from classes I took and classes for which I was a teaching assistant. I find the papers from some of my students, which I kept because they were excellent. I find my own papers. And here, on the other side, as a doctoral program drop-out, those papers are an emblem of a life that I can no longer live, a career path I can no longer follow.

I should throw them all away, each and every paper. But instead, I am working to consolidate four boxes into one. And what I am keeping are my students' papers, some notes about topics that still particularly interest me, and my own writing.

In my first year of graduate school, I had a mental breakdown. It was the second quarter, January through March, and my mind was just not quite my own. Yet still, as with my other breakdowns, I managed my schoolwork even as my emotional life flailed.

I was in a very engaging class called "Passing," in which we read and analyzed texts such as The Island of Dr. Moreau, M. Butterfly, and Passing. Animals passing as humans, men passing as women, blacks passing as whites.

I got interested especially in Dr. Moreau, and from that became interested in anti-vivisectionist movements in the nineteenth century. I gave a presentation on my research, and opened by saying "Before I begin, I want you all to know that it is a miracle of modern medicine that I can be with you here today." Then I passed around my bottle of anti-depressants.

It seemed like a good thing to do at the time. And the professors (there were two) liked it, probably because it was less boring than the usual introduction of a graduate student presentation.

Anyway, in going through my papers, I found a paper I wrote for that class, which is titled "sex, lies, and vivisection, or Fuck Black Beauty."

As I said, I was having some "issues."

I also found my handout for my presentation. I reproduce it here for your consideration.


This was during the first Gulf War, and so here are close-ups of some bits:




And here is my "Fun Words" list: