for the record....

Franklin was right, and I was wrong.



...about the painting, anyway.... that's not to say Sylvia didn't misread "ou" for "que." (Hey, it's possible, okay? Throw me a crumb here...)

Oh and, just to keep you posted, I'm working on that "Best Experiences in Japan" post, but there are lots of pix to go with it, so it's taking some time.

white people "find," black people "loot"

Check this out.

I had already been thinking, while watching the TV, that it's really ridiculous to refer to it as "looting" if (1) no stores are open and (2) people have no food, water, or diapers for the baby and (3) emergency services are nowhere to be found. What the hell would you do?

This from two dear friends, activists/organizers who live(d) in New Orleans:

To be honest, we have almost no idea where we will be tomorrow let alone in a week. We are planning our lives one day at a time at this point....We are
thinking about going to Atlanta for a while or Detroit. Not sure. We've just started talking about this.

We know we lost everything. But we are more sad about the loss of our
community. And I'm watching in horror as people wait to [be] rescued. We
still have some friends in the city.

I have nothing to say after that. This is awful.

manjusri

"Our root fantasy is that 'I' am real and there's a way to make 'me' happy.

It can be as simple as thinking that we'll be happy if we just get what we want.

The reason we meditate is to let that fantasy unravel."

- Sakyong Mipham
in Turning the Mind Into an Ally

a modest suggestion for whiling away the time during the very long march of the penguins

Note to self: senile Dad is not best source for movie recommendations.

So we went to see "The March of the Penguins" tonight and..... well, my strongest impression was that I was seeing someone's vacation photos.

It was like, some guys went to the Antarctic for a year and endured all this hardship, but man, they got some great photos, and wait, you gotta see this one, isn't that cool? but wait, this next one is really awesome, and oh my god, check this one out! Look at the feathers! Look at the eyes! We were so jazzed to get this great light that day... But wait, there's a bunch more, hold on, I'll get the other album...

In case you're thinking that at least I learned something about penguins, I regret to say that in fact the film is only marginally more informative than the paragraph above.

Don't get me wrong, it had its moments—its adorable, funny, sweet, and awe-inspiring moments—but, as Ang also notes, not enough of them for a feature film.

In order to make something useful out of this experience (for I am nothing if not resourceful--lemonade from lemons and all that) I have devised a drinking game.

I don't advise people to shell out the dough to see this film in the theater, but should you choose to rent it someday, here are the rules.

March of the Penguins drinking game 1. Drink once whenever Morgan Freeman says... "seventy miles" or "long journey" "hungry" "it's been (x) days/months since their last meal/since they've eaten" "they've lost (x fraction) of their body weight" "they will return" "not all will survive" "unborn child" anthropomorphisms: "love," "family," and any others you identify (Note: those who can't hold their liquor will want to scratch this rule, since that's, like, the whole movie.) 2. Drink twice for each closeup of a dead baby penguin or frozen egg.* 3. Drink three times whenever a group of penguins leaves the sea for the breeding ground, or leaves the breeding ground for the sea. 4. And whenever a predator appears on the screen, drink continuously until it catches a penguin.

Well, try it someday and let me know what you think.

---

*Many thanks to Franklin for this highly suitable suggestion.

goddamn those fucking spammers!!!

OK, I'm going to try one more thing before I turn on "word verification" (whatever that is) on my comments.

I'm going to try misspelling everything that could possibly turn up in a search--so far, the posts that generate spam are the ones that have either links or hot news item words in them.

So if you think I'm coming down with a bizarre late-blooming dyslexia, that's why.

---

Update: I gave up--there were too many buzzwords in the previous post. I started trying to replace the word "hurricane" with "very large round wind," which I hoped was sorta cute, but when I got to the correspondence with Sylvia and there were mentions of various states and cities, it just got illegible.

So I'll have to turn on the "word verification" thing, which I'm afraid will deter people from commenting, which would be bad because I pretty much live for comments. Agh.

we interrupt this travelogue...

...to bring you some disjointed thoughts on Hurricane Katrina.

Sylviaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

First, those of you who knew that Sylvia P moved to Baton Rouge will be relieved to hear that she is fine. I provide herewith our email discussion for your entertainment.

on 8/30/05 6:03 AM, [birdfarm] wrote:

>> Are you alive? I'll call you when it's a reasonable hour. Yeesh.
>> Welcome to Louisiana.

[Sylvia responded]:

> Yes, I'm fine. Baton Rouge has some power outages (not me) and a lot of
> debris, but we weren't in the path of the real hurricane. I did have an
> awful lot of rain water coming into my apartment, though, much of it on top
> of my television.

[birdfarm responded to that]:

Glad you're okay. How did rainwater get into your apartment? Are you on the top floor, or did it blow in through a big hole in the wall, or what? And why didn't you move your television? Inquiring minds want to know.

No response as yet. But I'll keep you posted.

Duh, I never thought of that...

There was a guy on TV saying "we didn't evacuate because we don't have anyplace to go." Until I saw that, I used to regard the folks who waved for help from their rooftops with some derision--"Stupid person, why didn't s/he evacuate when s/he was told to do so?"

But I realized it never occurred to me to wonder what a poor family would do if they didn't have relatives to go to--or didn't have a car, or didn't have money for another means of transport, or if all the busses had stopped running, etc. I mean, what are they going to do--walk through wind & rain until they figure they're on a big enough hill, and then what? Just sit down and hope the wind doesn't blow the baby away?

Obviously, it also didn't occur to the state of Louisiana to wonder what a poor family would do, and that's what pisses me off.

I mean, even if the state has no sympathy or consideration for poor people, consider how much more money they're going to spend helicoptering people off of rooftops, than they would have spent on a decent evacuation plan.

In Japan...

In Japan, before the typhoon that hit the night before we left, the police rounded people up in vulnerable areas of Shizuoka (where it hit worst) and took them to a school gym somewhere. It appeared that basic meals were even provided. The news had the evacuees on TV... a grandmother said she was a bit annoyed at the inconvenience, but commented that "It's just one night, so I guess it's no big deal."

So when the vulnerable areas of Shizuoka flooded, nobody died, and there were no dramatic helicopter rescues off rooftops. (The only person who died was smashed by a billboard that blew over... what a way to go).

OK, granted the typhoon was smaller than Katrina, but after being in Japan for three weeks I am quite confident that they could have handled a bigger typhoon in a similarly efficient manner. But I'll come back to that in a later post.

But c'mon, people, it just doesn't have to be so haphazard. How crazy is it to have 10,000 people in a sports arena without any running water--including people who need serious medical attention? How crazy is it for a city 8 feet below sea level to be so ill-prepared for something like this?

How many people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are going to die needlessly? It's insane.

two broads abroad (one broad, one broader)

So, we've been doing a lot of sleeping since we got back, but I feel pressure to get some photos up here--soon I'll start having other things to say and what if I'm not caught up with Japan yet? Then what will I do? (Laughing at self here!) But still....

I thought about trying to do a mini-travelogue ("then we went to Nara and saw these temples, then we went to Kyoto and saw these temples...") but decided a thematic approach might be better. So Loopy & I compiled some short lists.... We'll start with "Worst experience, best experience."

Worst experiences in Japan

for me

• Discovering that most of my expenses for my "tour guide" duties were NOT going to be reimbursed, i.e., we were actually going to be spending a lot of our own money to spend a lot of time with people we disliked (two of my non-favorites pictured below)--not only that but we were taking them to places they didn't seem to enjoy, when left to ourselves we'd really rather be visiting other places entirely. Ugh. Aak.
  

  Señora "Do they have chicken teriyaki?" (NO!!!)	Mademoiselle "Is there fish in this?" (YES!!!)

  
  
• The day after that, a particularly long & awful day trip (the one that was organized by someone else, I must add--but we still had to go, and still had to pay for it) was topped off by missing the last train home, having to take a sleeper train, and throwing up from bad sushi. Loopy describes it all in great detailhere.

for Loopy

• Standing in line for the train for 45 minutes at the Nagoya Expo, in high heat & humidity, amid a massive crowd (crowds give her serious claustrophobia)--after she'd already waited around for me to see "just one more thing" repeatedly for about four hours. The heat gave her a terrible heat rash on her ankles, which caused her pain for the rest of the trip (her description here--she doesn't mention how bad I was, which is very sweet of her, but it was all my fault & I feel terrible about it).
  
  
• Festival at Kasuga Taisha
  
  You will see this show up on my "best" list. I have no excuse for this evidence of utter heartlessness.
  
  Loopy describes what she liked about the event here, with pictures. What she didn't like was the horrendous crowd, heat, and walking.
  
  Another massive crowd--and this time, in addition to the panicky claustrophobic misery, she had to contend with people poking their umbrella points in her face (it was a crowd of short people in the rain) and flashbulbs going off in her eyes continually.
  
  Then, after we managed to escape that, we realized that the vast crowd had stopped all traffic and there was no hope of a taxi or bus, so we had to walk almost a mile to where traffic was moving--still in the heat, exacerbating Loopy's rash from Nagoya, so by the end of all this poor dear Loopy was in terrible pain. The next day her ankles looked like they'd been ironed (as in burnt, not as in flat). It was awful.
  
  In the photo you can see her being a very, very, very good sport. If you are wondering (1) why she ever goes anywhere with me at all and (2) why I'm still alive, you are not the only one.

Gotta go sleep some more, but tune in tomorrow for "Best Experiences"!

Loopy made me get up and she's still asleep.

It's so unfair. But I don't really mind, because after all, how could I object to having more time to screw around on the computer?

Hey, Ang, according to OK Cupid it turns out I am "the Maid of Honor." Hah!

Ah, I hear water running. Maybe soon we'll get some breakfast. Maybe at the General Store in Spring Green, which is another reason to be glad we're home. I like fish--even for breakfast--but I've had fish almost every meal almost every day for a month, so I will definitely enjoy a nice piece of quiche. Yay!

home sweet home II

The birdfeeders are empty, there's dog hair everywhere and the garden is a friggin disaster. And there's reactionary BS all over the TV. (What'll it be--CNN or "Boys Town"?)

But ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... my own bed. :-)

home sweet home

for better or for worse, getting married and settling into a wonderful house has seriously undermined my wanderlust.... although I can take 50% of the above (the spouse and the lust) with me when I wander, I do miss my home. Not like the old days, when there didn't seem to be anyplace I particularly wanted to be--at least not enough to outweigh the charms of a ruined Silk Road city or a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges.

Loopy seems quite irked to be back in the US, and she'll no doubt tell you all about it, but I confess I am very content. I loved the Detroit airport, even though--as always on a return from Japan--everything seemed dirty and broken, and--as always on a return from anywhere--the agents-formerly-known-as-INS* seemed to take precise and calculated delight in waving us through unquestioned, just to emphasize the intentionality of their insults to our swarthier fellow travellers.

But I loved:

• eating a bacon cheeseburger
  
• exchanging glances with confident dykes
  
• seeing women unapologetically in positions of authority (wearing uniforms that did not involve white gloves or pink neckerchiefs)
  
• having the waitress bring a coke instead of a sprite and not apologize as though she'd accidentally severed my hand

And, while this may sound odd, I realized I missed just being around Black people (hell, I miss that in friggin' Madison!).

There are many many things I don't love about this country, as you are all well aware. In case the immigration dudes weren't enough of a reminder, there was the CNN monitor blaring xenophobic racist bullshit across the airport.**

So don't think I've gone all soft on Amurrica now, or that I'm going to stop wandering off (already talking about a spring trip to Rome with our Kyoto fellow-traveler, who was very congenial).

All I'm saying is... well, I already said it.

Ah, I see that it's now 12:04, which concludes the 38 hours we've spent enjoying August 26th, our tenth wedding anniversary & twelfth year together--the longest anniversary day we're ever likely to spend. I've been trying to figure out all day how long a day lasts on planet earth--in other words, for how many hours is it August 26th someplace on the planet? But I'm too sleepy.

Anyway, I have been not-in-bed--in various places on the planet--for 30+ hours, and that's too long. I just needed to unwind a bit--you know how it is.

The last thing I'll say is that it was soooooooooooo wonderful to see Danielle at the airport after such a looooooooong and painful journey. She & hubby Mike kept our car for us while we were gone & drove us to & picked us up from the airport. They're so great.... we should spend more time with them.

Sorry for all the babbling....... soooo tired.....

---

*Did you know that "Homeland Security Agency" is a precise translation of the words whose acronym is "Gestapo"? I'm completely serious. Oh, wait, I just looked that up on Wikipedia and I'm completely wrong--Gestapo is short for Geheime Staatspolizei, "secret state police." Damn, I've been misleading people for years on that one. I'm leaving this in in case you were one of them. Shame on me.

** CNN outrage topics du jour: how can the Labor Board give jobs to FOREIGNERS??? and, how DARE a school board in Texas require principals of schools with large %s of Spanish-speaking students, to speak Spanish themselves? (you'd think those students might have something to say to the principal that s/he'd want to hear--of all the crazy things!) I honestly think a serious racist onslaught against Latinos is coming--already underway in many places, but seriously, something bigger is in preparation on a national scale. As evidence, look no further than the heaps of anti-immigrant junk mail on my dad's desk, or CNN again, which is full of xenophobic spew every friggin' day. But enuffa that....

for the last time....

...for a while anyway, I am currently...
1) sitting in a hotel lobby, unable to see our pile of bags--including my purse with passport and wallet inside--yet feeling completely confident that no mishap will befall them.
2) waiting for a taxi that will probably arrive precisely when promised
3) to go to a train that will probably depart precisely when promised (I would say definitely but there was a typhoon just a few hours ago, which adds maybe a 5% chance of non-punctuality)
3a) in full confidence that if the train is late, all train station employees will be extremely helpful and extremely apologetic (I wish I could trade Franklin some helpful train station employees for some sleazy lingerie catalogues)
4) sitting within a hundred yards of twenty-seven vending machines, seven noodle restaurants, and a hundred shops selling adorable little hello kitty tsotchkes.
5) fondly remembering my breakfast of fish, rice, unidentifiable dishes # 1, 2, and 3, and my plum-flavored toothpaste.

Ah, Japan.

i:m a sucker...

....for adorable Japanese animated characters...like these Nagoya expo mascots:




Of course, I now have a pen, a fan, some cookies, and a cell phone thingy that lights up when you get a call, all decorated with these guys in some form......and if the lines at the expo gift shop weren:t excessively long I would have more useless crap. I can:t help it. It:s irresistable. I know, I know, I:m an idiot.

As for the Expo itself, well, Google the damn thing if you want to know more about it; all I have to say is that it was very, very hot and I wandered about in a daze, getting badly sunburned and copying Japanese strategies for coping with heat, specifically, carry around (1) a fan--the one I used most has mickey mouse on it--and (2) a small towel--used to wipe the sweat that pours down your face; you can also periodically pour cold water on it and drape it over your head or around the back of your neck--all surprisingly effective, I might add! I amused myself with the thought that Ford Prefect would approve--cuz you know, these Japanese folks really know where their towels are. (On their heads)(But believe me, when it:s that hot, walking around with a wet towel on your head looks & feels perfectly reasonable, though I:m sure the pictures look ridiculous.)

No, that:s not all I have to say about the expo (is it ever??).

The US pavilion was truly horrifying, the India pavilion was delightful and very well done (pix to follow sometime) and I really loved watching this guy from Uzbekistan (or one of its neighbors; they were all in the same pavilion) decorate people:s cell phones for $20 with a teeny, tiny paintbrush in the most amazing patterns. (see below - something like this)


I thought about asking him to decorate my camera, but it was late & loopy was waiting...... now I kinda wish I:d done it, but anyway I took a picture and am happy with the memory, which still has me in awe.

I am so far behind with this blogging business, it:s not even funny. instead of all those towel stories & silly pictures of the little green guys, I should have been regaling you either with tales of our exploits, or with my thoughts on nationalism or collective-oriented culture............two themes I:ve been pondering during this trip....... (heaven forbid, you:re thinking, rolling your eyes--well, that:s the beauty of blogging--youdon:t have to read it!)

oh well, i don:t think the folks in Hokkaido have a computer, so I probably won:t blog again until the 23rd, when we will next re-visit this delightful little inn in Asakusa, Tokyo, with its computer in the lobby--so conveniently placed for one:s after-bath blogging pleasure...the only time you can use it uninterrupted!

o-yasumi nasai (good night).......

hee hee

On this computer at least, Blogger talks to me in Japanese!

My favorite part is when it says, "Bog が公開されました," which means, "Your Bog is finished uploading" (or whatever it says when it's in English).

Yup, my Bog.

It's adorable innit.

Also adorable are the mascots for the Nagoya expo. I originally had a link here, but it was generating spam, so I:m removing it and adding a new post with some of the pix of the mascots.

Some of my favorite memories...

...are referenced on Franklin's blog. But as is always the case with these things, I remember them differently. But for some reason I thought it would be less irritating of me to comment here, rather than on Franklin's blog. Not sure if this is true; do let me know (no, not really).

1) The Gaugin quote--I remember the second phrase as "Ou sommes nous," or "where are we," and hence, I remember Sylvia's dry remark as, "We came from breakfast. We are at the museum. We are going to lunch."

This is one of my all-time favorite memories, partly because at least in my memory the trip was a birthday celebration for the three of us who, if I'm not mistaken, almost share a birthday. I remember that as a very happy day amidst a sea of troubles.

2) The Jewish grandmother quote--I remember as, "sometimes you just wanna go to shul to get away from all the goyim." When Franklin & I first heard it, I believe we were hanging around on the lawn down by the river with a bunch of random queer kids, talking about why we still went to our school's queer club (known as BGLSA--uh huh, yeah, that really rolls of the tongue, doesn't it?) meetings even though they could be dull and/or irritating.

This memory is colored by a wash of carefree happiness that suggests (along with the green grass) that it took place some year either before or after the actual school term.

But whose grandmother was that? Dr. Faustus's? That doesn't seem right, but for some reason all the other queer Harvard boys I can think of (I'm sure it was a boy) are either Catholic or Chinese. Not that that would disqualify them from having a Jewish grandmother, but....

3) Pooh sticks. I have spent many happy hours playing the innocent game of Pooh sticks with various individuals, Amy most prominently among them, but featuring many others from my chequered past in its less chequered moments. And I refuse to have these delightful daydreams shattered by Franklin's insinuations. Really. Hmph.

4) And last but not least, a note about Japan. I've been displacing my stress about every other aspect of this trip onto stress about looking nice (or at least halfway decent), particularly when I first meet up with the assembly, which features in a prominent role someone whose respect I have in the past sought and (I at least believe) never attained, specifically the (Japanese) daughter of the founder of the high school I attended here in Japan. I feel that she always thinks of me as just a big mess who can't take care of herself (this dates back to my time here as a 16-year-old, when she had to call my parents to tell them to get me some new shoes because she had to hide my hole-y shoes when guests visited).

So today I carefully allowed an extra half hour to tidy myself up prior to the meeting. But everyone else was early too, so I showed up with messy hair, sweaty everything, and lunch stains on my shirt.

Ah well. More lessons in letting go of ego and accepting my lack of control over the universe.

Okay, that wasn't last. Last is, Loopy described the current situation well in her post; I am kinda freaked out by this. It wasn't until I visited dear Anushka in SF that it was pointed out to me that by helping these folks out I am supporting their endeavor. I'm not sure how prepared I am to do that. It's not exactly the opposite of socialism, but it's not really compatible, in terms of a worldview...what it is like, in terms of worldview, is the religious cult/group my parents belonged to for years....I just got done deprogramming myself from all this... I feel a bit like an AA twelve-stepper who accidentally signed up to support and accompany a vodka-swilling tour of Russia, or something. No, worse, a vodka-selling tour of rural Montana. Drink vodka, it will solve all your problems. Really.

The parallels start with (but certainly don't end with) the whole "let's all make friends and then there won't be any more war" thing.

Cuz y'know, that worked so well in Iraq (how many times in how many venues did I hear or see Kitty Kelly talking about her humanitarian work with the Wonderful People of Iraq? And did that stop the war? Not that I noticed; you?) (You probably never saw Kitty Kelly and maybe never even heard of her. My point exactly. Ever hear of Ben Granby? Jeremy Scahill? All of them, and hundreds more like them, traveled around the US pleading on behalf of their dear Iraqi friends. The only way to stop war is not "citizen diplomacy" but an end to imperialism, which of course is impossible without an end to capitalism. But don't get me started!)

I mean, international friendships are great, don't get me wrong, and the more kids from Kansas who are forced to travel the world and make international friendships, the better, but.......I'm too tired to explain what I mean right now, although I feel like it's still pretty murky. I'll catch up with y'all later.

what is the polite phrase for this situation?

so, day before yesterday we met the husband and two adorable children of my friend from high school, Ritsuko.

I have to preface this by saying that whenever Ritsuko mentions her husband in email/letters, somehow she gives the impression that she:s won a big shiny prize, so I figured he must be someone fairly impressive. (The fact that the only things she wanted from the U.S. were Colgate Total and a xerox of her husband:s page in "Who:s Who" was also a bit of an indicator).

So anyway he gives us his business card and jokes self-effacingly (in perfect English) that you can:t really tell what the heck he does from what:s written on the card. "Climate change" and "research" are two words that stand out.

"So you're involved in climate change research?" I ask.

"Yes," he says.

"So were you involved in drafting the Kyoto protocols?" I ask.

"Yes, exactly," he says, nodding and smirking a little.

Pause.

"Uh.... sorry about that," I say. "Yeah, uh, sorry," Loopy adds.

"It's okay, it's not your fault," he says.

Gee, thanks.

first twenty-four hours...

My first 24 to 48 hours in a different culture (I mean a really different culture) tend to make me feel blind. There:s* a visual cacophony that the brain can:t process. Images reach the retina but aren:t perceived.

This happened a little in Thailand, first stop on my long-ago round-the-world journey, although Bangkok is enough of a global city that I could get my bearings to some extent. But I do remember having breakfast in the hotel cafe and just feeling a huge shock hit me like a brick wall. To stop my head from spinning, I left the cafe and just started walking, since I was on a major thoroughfare through the city (think Broadway)(only not at all like Broadway, starting with the orchids growing wild in the crooks of the trees). I walked about three miles before I felt human again.

But I had this experience in Nepal most intensely. I literally couldn:t process anything...the first time I left the hotel I felt like I was feeling my way down a wall in the dark, even though I was walking down the street in broad daylight. I was heading for a guidebook-recommended restaurant called "KC's" just a minute or two from the hotel. I remember catching sight of the restaurant:s sign, the only Roman lettering I saw, and latching onto it desperately, feeling like I was struggling toward it through some kind of storm or chaos--even though the chaos was all in my head as my brain struggled to make sense of anything, anything at all, that met my eyes.

This effect is of course much less in Japan, but still, when we walked out today and wandered a bit in the temple area, I was amazed at how many more details I saw that I had completely missed on the first day. I didn:t notice that there were gigantic straw shoes (at least one story tall) hanging on the temple gate (an offering from some locality or other), or that the whole end of the temple is decorated magnificently...or that there:s a garden on the west side...

And, speaking of the first twenty-four hours, here:s what I meant to blog from that day:

1) "Let:s never go home" - spoken after eating the most delicate, delicious, wonderful sushi ***ever*** in a total hole-in-the-wall bar...

2) "Let:s never go to Japan again" - spoken after two and a half exhausting hours at the train station, during which we struggled with train schedule books (which I kinda enjoy actually), were yelled at by Belgians, and then tried to figure out how two rotund foreigners were going to get around the country on trains built for teeny weeny people (how do sumo wrestlers survive, anyway? - maybe it helps to be a national icon)....final conclusion: rather than buying two expensive seats (wider) it:s actually cheaper to buy one cheap seat (beside the two we get for free with our rail passes) giving us a total of three cheap seats.... also known as, "our trip around Japan with our imaginary friend." Sheesh.

Tomorrow we go to Nagoya and my job as guide & interpreter (how we got to Japan in the first place) begins..... We:ll try to keep posting but as you know, life on the road is unpredictable.....

---

*The colon (:) on this Japanese keyboard is in the same place that the apostrophe is on a US keyboard. I have been spending many precious minutes (as hordes of cranky impatient Europeans mill about waiting to use the sole computer of this establishment) going back and changing the colons for apostrophes. 'Nuffa that.

genshi bakudan

Today was the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. A couple of thoughts...

1. On the news this morning, about fifteen minutes was devoted to a respectful reflection, interviews with survivors and present-day residents of Hiroshima, etc. (Made me cry....one of the survivors talked about how she still has a moment of terror every time a camera flash goes off...) Then on to the typhoon in Okinawa and a guy who keeps 300 bugs in his apartment. Now, think about it. If anyone had ever dropped a nuclear bomb on the U.S., CNN would be all-bomb-all-the-time on every anniversary forever after.

2. Fifty thousand people were killed instantly, and another 100,000-plus died of their injuries later. And people have the nerve to say, of Sept. 11, that "nothing like this has ever happened before." Uh, scuse me but, yes, it has, and we did it.

3. And here's what "we," or rather our esteemed leader FDR, had to say about it:

But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, nor its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan. And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry to design, and of labor to operate, the machines and methods to do things never done before so that the brain child of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do.

This wasn't some reflection in a memoir fifty years later--this was the friggin' press release the day after it happened. How cold-blooded can you get?

4. If the U.S. were anything resembling a "civilized" nation, we would apologize. But no, we can't do that, because that might cause people to have some doubt about our current endeavors in Iraq etc.....

Gotta go.......

More: here, here, and here.

hot and wet

When I thought about blogging during the last 40-plus hours since I last slept, I planned to call the first post "long day's journey into night," but as I sit down to write the title above seems more appropriate. Theoretically it isn:t any hotter here than in WI, but it's so humid and there's no airconditioning anywhere....But enough whining.

It's so strange and cool to be back here, 18 years after my first visit, 13 years since my last...everything looks different through the eyes of a 34-year-old....

it's funny to contemplate how very little I know about anything, and how very much I used to think I knew....

At the same time, so many little concrete material things are so ordinary and familiar....

It's like revisiting a familiar country that has been entirely repopulated by people who speak a different language. But it's not about language--I speak the language almost as well now as I did when I lived here, in some ways better thanks to all the classes etc.

It's about the fact that my assumptions are vastly different, assumptions about what I know, understand, --what people were thinking, whether they were good or bad human beings, what the culture was all about...

Another weird aspect: I was as happy here as I'd ever been, but since then I've been much, much happier.

Well, I:ve been looking forward to a Japanese bath for the last 40-plus hours, so off to have one.

Before I keel over in the friggin' lobby.

bye-bye!

We're going to Japan.

Dunno if we'll be able to blog or not, and as it's 4:17 a.m. I'm not going to blog now.

Instead, I offer something else to entertain you .... Be sure to check out the link from that page to this page too.

Should I go to bed or just stay up?

go Loopy go!

Loopy is taking her prelim as we speak! I can't wait for it to be over!!!

As a gesture of my profound sympathy I've arranged to visit the dentist this afternoon during the final hours of Loopy's suffering.

Then we will celerate—or as Loopy has taken to saying since the Scrabble incident, celerate like we've never celerated before!

Wish you all were here!

why i went to design school

For those of you who have tuned in intermittantly over the last ten or fifteen years, and those who have just joined us recently, it may be unclear why I left my second promising career to go to night school at Parsons School of Design in NYC.

Basically it was because, when I got "stuck" in my life as a grad student, I started doing art projects continuously. So I figured that was what I wanted to be doing, so I should do it.

The problem of course is that when you do things you love for money, they aren't a whole lot of fun anymore. In fact they can become downright painful. So, farewell to my third promising career.....

Well, this summer has been kinda deja vu-ish with regard to stuckness and art projects: I took almost six hundred photos in the garden.

No, I am not exaggerating. Yes, really—almost 600. Here's one.

I flatter myself that it has a sort of Georgia O'Keeffe meets Herb Ritz kinda vibe. No, just kidding. But I do like it.

Of course, I would like it even more if I had finished everything I was supposed to do this summer. I would like to feel some degree of confidence that I could get up in the morning, decide what to do for the day, and have at least a decent shot at actually doing it.

But then I probably would have about 580 fewer photographs of flowers in my garden.

And I can't help feeling that this would be something of a loss, if only to me personally. I'm glad that I know what the inside of a poppy looks like, and now, (if you didn't before) so do you:

I learned a lot about myself this summer... but I won't bore you with that now. Instead, I'll bore (or amuse or delight) you with just one more six-hundredth of the byproduct of my procrastination/exploration....

And the beauty of it is, that even though it's 2 a.m. so I can't take photos of the garden right now, I can STILL keep procrastinating using those same photos! Wow!

I suppose......there are worse places to be than "stuck."

sui generis

is, according to Ang, her "Least Favorite Academic-y Sounding Phrase Ever."

If she had comments on her blog I would say this there, but instead I'll say it here.

There is a magazine called New York, and in the back, they used to have a page (perhaps still do) dedicated to little word games—people would submit little plays-on-words on particular themes. It was often hilarious.

One time the theme was something about skewed translations of words/phrases in other languages. (Their example wasn't, but could have been, an old fave of my mom's—"tant pis, tant mieux" which means something like, "ya win some, ya lose some," but which is jokingly translated as "aunt went to the bathroom, aunt feels better." Ha very ha.)

So anyway anyway, the winner in this particular word-play contest was:
sui generis: a fat hog.

I'm trying to LOL quietly so I don't wake Loopy from her pre-prelim rest.... but yes, this many years later, that still cracks me up.