Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
I am so effing good at packing
Non-exhaustive list of items currently in my luggage:
- work suit
- workout suit
- winter pyjama suit
- winter coat (full-length wool)
- winter boots
- business-lady boots
- converse sneakers
- 8 DVDs
- 6 books
- 2 jeans
- infinity shirts
- box mini wheats
- bag pasta
- pack of mushrooms
- 12 packets oatmeal
- a green pepper
- a red pepper
- 2 bags rice (brown basmati, jasmine)
- 1 lb carrots
- 700g coffee in a tupperware
- half-eaten brick of asiago
- 1.14 L Crown Royale
Giddy up.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
May school math
Good weather + good job - good marks + good man - good sleep + good friends = a good life.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Law Student State of the Union
It's not that I've lost interest in this blog - that's not it at all.
It's just that... well, the post title says it all. Somehow being a law student has completely taken over my time, attention, and identity. I find this disturbing and uncomfortable, especially since I'm not sure I like law school. More specifically, I strongly dislike it in most ways.
I think later in life I will look back on this as That Time I Felt Confused For A Whole Year.
See you in June?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The very early morning of Nov 5, 2008
It's almost 5am, I'm still awake from last night, and I'm wired.
It's a tense, artificial energy I'm familiar with, which always arrives around this time at the end of a long night.
I watched the election tonight with some friends, had a few drinks, didn't touch my assignment for tomorrow. I felt something lean and strong inside me pull taut as the evening progressed, and stopped worrying about getting it done; my nerves have carried me through far harder nights.
We watched CNN without flipping. We joked about their holograms, ogled Anderson Cooper, and coloured in a map of the US red and blue as the states were called. We made rude jokes.
At the same time, as that old something pulled taut inside me, it became harder and harder to ignore how much I had invested in this election - not only in the man I've never met but have a guilty trust in, but in the process that's unfolded over the last two years and in something even larger than that. That taut solid something could feel my eyes flickering across the screen, cracking my wrists and pulling at my fingers as I watched the numbers and, more importantly, listened to what was being said.
My search for decency in the human race is all-consuming. It is happening at every moment of my day. Every gesture of respect and compassion, from a nod between strangers to much larger sacrifices, gets tucked away and archived as evidence that the faith which sustains me is not a foolish one. My most fundamental faith is that, given two options or positions argued with equal skill, people will generally choose the more decent of the two. At moments like tonight, I realize how fragile and edifying that faith is, and how much it sometimes takes to maintain.
I think this is where my attraction to Obama comes from. His rhetorical gift (and maybe his political gift generally) is in reconnecting us with our place in the larger picture - of a community, a society, a moment in history. And reconnecting Americans with their finer selves. I guess I see in his approach to politics (or at least to this campaign) a mirror of my fundamental faith: that whenever it makes sense to do so, people will be higher, better, good.
I cheered when CNN called it for Obama. I teared up a bit. But I realized - after McCain's speech, which seemed so dignified after the last few weeks, after thinking of Obama's grandmother who missed this moment by only a single day, after seeing Jesse Jackson crying in the crowd - that for all the validation, the relief, the release of tension and the renewal, this moment was bittersweet.
We saw tonight the realization of dreams which were long overdue, hard-earned, and glorious in the truest sense of the word. But to be honest, to be selfish, I need to admit that around 11.30 I suddenly wanted to see Hillary Rodham-Clinton... badly.
I was really surprised to be having that reaction. I had a hard time getting too excited about Clinton during the primaries - too centrist, I guess, too 'establishment,' and of course a little resistence to the idea that I ought to support her for her femaleness - although I had no trouble getting worked up about the sexist bullshit heaped upon her. But god damn. God damn.
Some day I will get to feel what Jesse Jackson felt tonight. But not today - and possibly not for a long time yet.
I was moved when Obama came out with his family. I was choked up through the first part of his speech - choked up and reminded that there's a very, very good reason why this man won. He had no real reason to include Clinton in his acknowledgements, but I couldn't help wanting to hear her name. It didn't come.
Obama's acceptance speech was probably the most memorable public address I've ever heard. By "waited for hours," by "gay and straight, disabled and not disabled," by the time we were putting our hands on the arc of history and bending it towards a better day, my mind was blown. I laugh-sobbed at Sasha and Malia's puppy.
Mostly, though, this speech was remarkable for the things it put to rest. I have cringed, at times, at the way Obama rhetorically collapses his own electoral victory with the accomplishment of the "change we need" idea, especially when he links his own fortunes to those of the voters and his campaign volunteers. Tonight, somehow, the next step happened: he rolled that momentum seamlessly, self-evidently, into the idea that what began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night; that what's been earned is not a victory but an opportunity; that the spirit of service is renewed not concluded tonight.
That this man will seek to belong even to those whose faith he hasn't yet earned.
Needless to say, by the time he got to Ann Nixon Cooper, the bittersweetness was gone. A good friend who I spoke to afterwards said it felt like watching the moon landing, and that's exactly correct. I caught myself mouthing "yes we can," I nodded and shook my head at the New Deal and the buses in Birmingham.
But it was a shot of a black woman nodding along in the crowd that made me break down and cry.
It's a tense, artificial energy I'm familiar with, which always arrives around this time at the end of a long night.
I watched the election tonight with some friends, had a few drinks, didn't touch my assignment for tomorrow. I felt something lean and strong inside me pull taut as the evening progressed, and stopped worrying about getting it done; my nerves have carried me through far harder nights.
We watched CNN without flipping. We joked about their holograms, ogled Anderson Cooper, and coloured in a map of the US red and blue as the states were called. We made rude jokes.
At the same time, as that old something pulled taut inside me, it became harder and harder to ignore how much I had invested in this election - not only in the man I've never met but have a guilty trust in, but in the process that's unfolded over the last two years and in something even larger than that. That taut solid something could feel my eyes flickering across the screen, cracking my wrists and pulling at my fingers as I watched the numbers and, more importantly, listened to what was being said.
My search for decency in the human race is all-consuming. It is happening at every moment of my day. Every gesture of respect and compassion, from a nod between strangers to much larger sacrifices, gets tucked away and archived as evidence that the faith which sustains me is not a foolish one. My most fundamental faith is that, given two options or positions argued with equal skill, people will generally choose the more decent of the two. At moments like tonight, I realize how fragile and edifying that faith is, and how much it sometimes takes to maintain.
I think this is where my attraction to Obama comes from. His rhetorical gift (and maybe his political gift generally) is in reconnecting us with our place in the larger picture - of a community, a society, a moment in history. And reconnecting Americans with their finer selves. I guess I see in his approach to politics (or at least to this campaign) a mirror of my fundamental faith: that whenever it makes sense to do so, people will be higher, better, good.
I cheered when CNN called it for Obama. I teared up a bit. But I realized - after McCain's speech, which seemed so dignified after the last few weeks, after thinking of Obama's grandmother who missed this moment by only a single day, after seeing Jesse Jackson crying in the crowd - that for all the validation, the relief, the release of tension and the renewal, this moment was bittersweet.
We saw tonight the realization of dreams which were long overdue, hard-earned, and glorious in the truest sense of the word. But to be honest, to be selfish, I need to admit that around 11.30 I suddenly wanted to see Hillary Rodham-Clinton... badly.
I was really surprised to be having that reaction. I had a hard time getting too excited about Clinton during the primaries - too centrist, I guess, too 'establishment,' and of course a little resistence to the idea that I ought to support her for her femaleness - although I had no trouble getting worked up about the sexist bullshit heaped upon her. But god damn. God damn.
Some day I will get to feel what Jesse Jackson felt tonight. But not today - and possibly not for a long time yet.
I was moved when Obama came out with his family. I was choked up through the first part of his speech - choked up and reminded that there's a very, very good reason why this man won. He had no real reason to include Clinton in his acknowledgements, but I couldn't help wanting to hear her name. It didn't come.
Obama's acceptance speech was probably the most memorable public address I've ever heard. By "waited for hours," by "gay and straight, disabled and not disabled," by the time we were putting our hands on the arc of history and bending it towards a better day, my mind was blown. I laugh-sobbed at Sasha and Malia's puppy.
Mostly, though, this speech was remarkable for the things it put to rest. I have cringed, at times, at the way Obama rhetorically collapses his own electoral victory with the accomplishment of the "change we need" idea, especially when he links his own fortunes to those of the voters and his campaign volunteers. Tonight, somehow, the next step happened: he rolled that momentum seamlessly, self-evidently, into the idea that what began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night; that what's been earned is not a victory but an opportunity; that the spirit of service is renewed not concluded tonight.
That this man will seek to belong even to those whose faith he hasn't yet earned.
Needless to say, by the time he got to Ann Nixon Cooper, the bittersweetness was gone. A good friend who I spoke to afterwards said it felt like watching the moon landing, and that's exactly correct. I caught myself mouthing "yes we can," I nodded and shook my head at the New Deal and the buses in Birmingham.
But it was a shot of a black woman nodding along in the crowd that made me break down and cry.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
A new study on young women and sexual violence, and some thoughts on language
This report, by ChildTrends.org, is incredibly upsetting, but hardly news to those of us who have some familiarity, either personally or professionally, with sexual assault. While conservative statistics about rates of incidence of rape tend to put the figure at around 1 in 6 (North American women, at some time in their lives), I think it's becoming increasingly clear that, to get a real feel for how many women have experienced sexual abuse in their lives, the terms need to be broadened. This new study suggests that 18% of women aged 18 to 24 have had forced sexual intercourse. That's more like 1 in 5, by around the time most of us are finishing college or getting our first "real" job.
Which has got me thinking (again) about the role of language in how we talk about sexual violence, and about our experiences more generally.
There's a reason we say "sexual assault" and not "rape," why we say "survivor" and not "victim" or "accuser," and why we let women tell us when it was rape and when it wasn't, rather than us telling them. This is all Sexual Assault 101.
But in this specific context (meaning a blog generally, and a personal-politics blog more specifically), I think there's something else going on.
A few days ago, my dad and I got into a very heated conversation about the American election. At the end of a long series of frustrating back-and-forths, he informed me that Michelle Obama is going to cost Barack the election, because she's just so *aggressive*. "I heard her speech at the DNC, and I couldn't believe how aggressive it was."
I had kept my cool through the conversation until this point - through accusations that I was relentlessly partisan, that I had a personal vendetta against Palin, that the idea that Palin was anti-woman was laughable, that McCain's POW status prevented all criticisms of his foreign policy approach - and then I flipped my shit. With tears in my eyes and no embarassment, I told him that when you hurl a word like "aggressive" at a woman like Michelle Obama, you're hurling it at all of us. Us. Us. Me. Me as a professional-to-be. That word tears down my future. Mine.
And then I realized I should have been saying this all along.
Sometimes objectivity is necessary and helpful. Sometimes it's the only path to the truth. And sometimes it's not.
This isn't a newspaper, or CNN, and I'm not a politician. When I talk on this blog, or with people in my own life, I have no professional obligations to be neutral. I'm not campaigning, trying to win people over to my side with diplomacy. I have no obligation to be neutral when I have something at stake, or to try to make myself seem rational by going out of my way to grant points to the other side, even when they make me wince.
My attempts at objectivity, at not taking things personally or getting emotional, enabled my dad to treat the misogynistic language of this election as a purely academic issue. I enabled that with him, as I have in many other conversations. That might be a disservice to him, but it's definitely a disservice to me. I, and women in general, are not a theoretical concept. Once I teared up and said my bit, he refused to continue the discussion "if I was going to get all emotional about it." The truth is, I wanted him to see the emotion. I didn't want him to have the luxury of treating sexism as a purely rhetorical problem, when we are living it. I wanted to break him out of those habits of thought and into my world. It's not that he doesn't care, he's just never had it made real in this way by someone he loves.
Which is why I'm rethinking the way I talk about women's issues on this blog and in general. Let me take one more stab at introducing that new Child Trends.
By the time we are 25 years old, 1 in 5 of us will have experienced forced intercourse.
Because it's us that I really want to talk about.
(h/t to Feministing.)
Which has got me thinking (again) about the role of language in how we talk about sexual violence, and about our experiences more generally.
There's a reason we say "sexual assault" and not "rape," why we say "survivor" and not "victim" or "accuser," and why we let women tell us when it was rape and when it wasn't, rather than us telling them. This is all Sexual Assault 101.
But in this specific context (meaning a blog generally, and a personal-politics blog more specifically), I think there's something else going on.
A few days ago, my dad and I got into a very heated conversation about the American election. At the end of a long series of frustrating back-and-forths, he informed me that Michelle Obama is going to cost Barack the election, because she's just so *aggressive*. "I heard her speech at the DNC, and I couldn't believe how aggressive it was."
I had kept my cool through the conversation until this point - through accusations that I was relentlessly partisan, that I had a personal vendetta against Palin, that the idea that Palin was anti-woman was laughable, that McCain's POW status prevented all criticisms of his foreign policy approach - and then I flipped my shit. With tears in my eyes and no embarassment, I told him that when you hurl a word like "aggressive" at a woman like Michelle Obama, you're hurling it at all of us. Us. Us. Me. Me as a professional-to-be. That word tears down my future. Mine.
And then I realized I should have been saying this all along.
Sometimes objectivity is necessary and helpful. Sometimes it's the only path to the truth. And sometimes it's not.
This isn't a newspaper, or CNN, and I'm not a politician. When I talk on this blog, or with people in my own life, I have no professional obligations to be neutral. I'm not campaigning, trying to win people over to my side with diplomacy. I have no obligation to be neutral when I have something at stake, or to try to make myself seem rational by going out of my way to grant points to the other side, even when they make me wince.
My attempts at objectivity, at not taking things personally or getting emotional, enabled my dad to treat the misogynistic language of this election as a purely academic issue. I enabled that with him, as I have in many other conversations. That might be a disservice to him, but it's definitely a disservice to me. I, and women in general, are not a theoretical concept. Once I teared up and said my bit, he refused to continue the discussion "if I was going to get all emotional about it." The truth is, I wanted him to see the emotion. I didn't want him to have the luxury of treating sexism as a purely rhetorical problem, when we are living it. I wanted to break him out of those habits of thought and into my world. It's not that he doesn't care, he's just never had it made real in this way by someone he loves.
Which is why I'm rethinking the way I talk about women's issues on this blog and in general. Let me take one more stab at introducing that new Child Trends.
By the time we are 25 years old, 1 in 5 of us will have experienced forced intercourse.
Because it's us that I really want to talk about.
(h/t to Feministing.)
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Better late than never (for a principled stand)
Apparently I'm the last person in the world to discover Common Dreams.
I stumbled onto it following this link on why one of my favourite bloggers, L-girl of We Move to Canada (linked at right), won't be watching the Olympics this year. There's been a lot of discussion about the benefits, drawbacks, and justification (or lack thereof) for a boycott of the Games: does the West have a right to throw stones? is it a good thing that the world will be taking a good look at China at this crucial moment? will a boycott only, in the end, hurt our own athletes and China's poor? Of course in each conversation you get the inevitable mix of quackery, non-sequiturs, and concern trolling.
The title story on Common Dreams today, "China Using Olympics as 'Pretext' for Crackdown: Amnesty," corroborates the worst of our suspicions about what's going on over there, and provides as good an occasion as any to share one of my many Stories From When I Was In India to explain why I will be joining whole-heartedly in the boycott - and why you all should, too.
When I Was In India, I met lots of other people who were away on Big Trips - many of which were much bigger than mine. One of the most interesting people was a Canadian woman in her mid-20's who I met in Dharamsala. She was on her second year-long trip through Asia. On her first trip, she'd come through China, among other countries, and when I met her, she was still debating whether or not she was going to return on this trip.
Her family was Chinese by background, and she spoke a little bit of Cantonese. We talked a lot about where we'd been - and she'd been everywhere - but she had a bit of trouble speaking clearly about her time in China. All her sentences seemed to U-turn mid-way, veering from rants about the poverty to rhapsody about the quiet generosity of the people she met, and then from romantic descriptions of the coast to terse protests against the uselessness of the newspapers. She sounded like she was scanning her own comments, maybe her own feelings, for the exact wording that would leave me with an accurate impression of her time there without falling into any of the many pits that we all tend to fall into when talking and thinking about China.
The last story she told me was this one.
She was on a train somewhere in the interior - I forget which province. It was packed. About an hour before she was supposed to be getting off, she looked in her bag and noticed that her iPod was gone. She reported the loss to a railroad employee in the car, who told her to sit still for a moment and disappeared into the front of the train. The conducter stopped the train in the middle of nowhere. A few minutes later, the conducter and the man she's approached for help climbed into her car and began searching people. They were doing a sweep of the entire train, looking for her missing iPod. In the car behind her, they found it. The rail employee returned it to her and told her the situation was being taken care of. Out her window, she saw the conductor pulling a young man away from the train. He was bleeding heavily from his face but was still struggling. Two other men in rail uniforms followed. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the man point-blank in the head. They left his body there, and the train kept moving.
When she told me this story, I was so shocked that I didn't ask her any questions. She said she almost ended her trip after that, even though she was only a few months in. But she felt like she couldn't leave.
I have no framework for thinking about what it must be like to live in a place where the state has that kind of power, or where one word from a foreigner can (unintentionally) get a man killed. I don't ever want to need a framework for that.
I know this story is undocumented, and that anyone reading it is automatically hearing it at least two times removed from its original source. It's anecdotal and unverifiable. But I remember so clearly what she looked like while telling this story - this petite Canadian girl who had no reason to lie to me.
I do think that some folks are onto something when they point out that the attention China is getting over the Games has the potential to help the Chinese people. A huge part of that will be education (at least of the West, most of which hasn't been following China too closely until the last few years) about what's going on.
On the 8th, my TV gets turned off. I hope yours will, too.
I stumbled onto it following this link on why one of my favourite bloggers, L-girl of We Move to Canada (linked at right), won't be watching the Olympics this year. There's been a lot of discussion about the benefits, drawbacks, and justification (or lack thereof) for a boycott of the Games: does the West have a right to throw stones? is it a good thing that the world will be taking a good look at China at this crucial moment? will a boycott only, in the end, hurt our own athletes and China's poor? Of course in each conversation you get the inevitable mix of quackery, non-sequiturs, and concern trolling.
The title story on Common Dreams today, "China Using Olympics as 'Pretext' for Crackdown: Amnesty," corroborates the worst of our suspicions about what's going on over there, and provides as good an occasion as any to share one of my many Stories From When I Was In India to explain why I will be joining whole-heartedly in the boycott - and why you all should, too.
When I Was In India, I met lots of other people who were away on Big Trips - many of which were much bigger than mine. One of the most interesting people was a Canadian woman in her mid-20's who I met in Dharamsala. She was on her second year-long trip through Asia. On her first trip, she'd come through China, among other countries, and when I met her, she was still debating whether or not she was going to return on this trip.
Her family was Chinese by background, and she spoke a little bit of Cantonese. We talked a lot about where we'd been - and she'd been everywhere - but she had a bit of trouble speaking clearly about her time in China. All her sentences seemed to U-turn mid-way, veering from rants about the poverty to rhapsody about the quiet generosity of the people she met, and then from romantic descriptions of the coast to terse protests against the uselessness of the newspapers. She sounded like she was scanning her own comments, maybe her own feelings, for the exact wording that would leave me with an accurate impression of her time there without falling into any of the many pits that we all tend to fall into when talking and thinking about China.
The last story she told me was this one.
She was on a train somewhere in the interior - I forget which province. It was packed. About an hour before she was supposed to be getting off, she looked in her bag and noticed that her iPod was gone. She reported the loss to a railroad employee in the car, who told her to sit still for a moment and disappeared into the front of the train. The conducter stopped the train in the middle of nowhere. A few minutes later, the conducter and the man she's approached for help climbed into her car and began searching people. They were doing a sweep of the entire train, looking for her missing iPod. In the car behind her, they found it. The rail employee returned it to her and told her the situation was being taken care of. Out her window, she saw the conductor pulling a young man away from the train. He was bleeding heavily from his face but was still struggling. Two other men in rail uniforms followed. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the man point-blank in the head. They left his body there, and the train kept moving.
When she told me this story, I was so shocked that I didn't ask her any questions. She said she almost ended her trip after that, even though she was only a few months in. But she felt like she couldn't leave.
I have no framework for thinking about what it must be like to live in a place where the state has that kind of power, or where one word from a foreigner can (unintentionally) get a man killed. I don't ever want to need a framework for that.
I know this story is undocumented, and that anyone reading it is automatically hearing it at least two times removed from its original source. It's anecdotal and unverifiable. But I remember so clearly what she looked like while telling this story - this petite Canadian girl who had no reason to lie to me.
I do think that some folks are onto something when they point out that the attention China is getting over the Games has the potential to help the Chinese people. A huge part of that will be education (at least of the West, most of which hasn't been following China too closely until the last few years) about what's going on.
On the 8th, my TV gets turned off. I hope yours will, too.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
In which I claw my way back out of total mental stasis
Alright.
Things have been a little slow since I've been home. I culture shocked pretty bad for about a week - every time I saw the colour white I was stopped in my tracks. Any street without pedestrians made me feel like I was living in a post-apocalyptic zombie world. For the first few days, I smelled everything - the Toronto airport, Canadian trees, my house, our car, you. Then, after it faded, I was desperate for days at a time to smell anything at all. I slept poorly, waking up in inky silence. One night, in a groggy half-delirium, I woke up thinking I should be able to hear my heartbeat, but there was just silence. I took my pulse at the wrist. Still there. Slid back into sleep, felt silly in the morning - silly, but also empty.
It's been more than a month since I got back and I've spent it unemployed and claustrophobic. I've been to Montreal and Toronto twice each, looking for company and a new home respectively. I've been job-seeking, emailing, sorting photos. I've done a little reading, but less than 200 pages. Mostly, 've been haunting the house feeling increasingly unsettled and useless.
All of which has reminded me that idleness one of the quickest harbingers of poor mental health... at least for me.
A few big things have happened in the last few days. First, I got hired. It's nothing to be of - just a lousy retail gig, actually one I was offered once in high school - but there's a paycheck coming in my near future. There's no emoticon indicating "sigh of relief," is there? I guess that's because 15-year olds rarely contemplate paying law school tuition and Toronto rent without any savings. Kids these days.
I also had my first orientation day at Osgoode, which feels too much like home for me to accept the nickname 'Oz.' Its homeliness is good and bad. I felt sincerely welcomed and inspired by what I heard, but not challenged.* I know without equivocation that I will eat these words over the next few months, but that doesn't stop the feeling now.
I also found my notes for a writing project I had started dreaming about during the months before I left. I still like it, and it still scares me. So, great. Included: a note from a former co-worker in response. "I think you're on to something." You know, I might be.
Perhaps most importantly, while I was in Montreal last weekend I made a pact with a friend. We both tried to think of something that we knew in our minds that we could do if we worked at it, but which seemed completely unimagineable at the moment. We both needed a bit of a kick-start in our lives, and this seemed like the way to do it. She came up with doing a triathlon next summer. I came up with running a marathon.
This, in 2009, is going to be my marathon. I have well over a year to train for it - enough time to prepare if I work at it consistently, not enough time to drag my feet. I have new running shoes and I've started my jogging training plan. I run three times a week for the next 8 weeks when I adjust my schedule based on my fitness level. By that time, my free York U gym membership will have kicked in.
So far I'm excited and feeling good - about everything. In this spirit, I present a new post tag, inspired by my unspeakable love for Simon Pegg: "Run, fatgirl, run."
All this to say, I'm resurrecting this blog. All previous entries from my India trip are now going to be tagged with "India" and archived. I'm hoping to post substantively at least once or twice a week, depending on how school is going. At the moment, I'm bursting with things I want to talk about - mostly the things I always talk about: politics, pop, and progress.
Stay tuned.
*Budgetary challenge not included.
Things have been a little slow since I've been home. I culture shocked pretty bad for about a week - every time I saw the colour white I was stopped in my tracks. Any street without pedestrians made me feel like I was living in a post-apocalyptic zombie world. For the first few days, I smelled everything - the Toronto airport, Canadian trees, my house, our car, you. Then, after it faded, I was desperate for days at a time to smell anything at all. I slept poorly, waking up in inky silence. One night, in a groggy half-delirium, I woke up thinking I should be able to hear my heartbeat, but there was just silence. I took my pulse at the wrist. Still there. Slid back into sleep, felt silly in the morning - silly, but also empty.
It's been more than a month since I got back and I've spent it unemployed and claustrophobic. I've been to Montreal and Toronto twice each, looking for company and a new home respectively. I've been job-seeking, emailing, sorting photos. I've done a little reading, but less than 200 pages. Mostly, 've been haunting the house feeling increasingly unsettled and useless.
All of which has reminded me that idleness one of the quickest harbingers of poor mental health... at least for me.
A few big things have happened in the last few days. First, I got hired. It's nothing to be of - just a lousy retail gig, actually one I was offered once in high school - but there's a paycheck coming in my near future. There's no emoticon indicating "sigh of relief," is there? I guess that's because 15-year olds rarely contemplate paying law school tuition and Toronto rent without any savings. Kids these days.
I also had my first orientation day at Osgoode, which feels too much like home for me to accept the nickname 'Oz.' Its homeliness is good and bad. I felt sincerely welcomed and inspired by what I heard, but not challenged.* I know without equivocation that I will eat these words over the next few months, but that doesn't stop the feeling now.
I also found my notes for a writing project I had started dreaming about during the months before I left. I still like it, and it still scares me. So, great. Included: a note from a former co-worker in response. "I think you're on to something." You know, I might be.
Perhaps most importantly, while I was in Montreal last weekend I made a pact with a friend. We both tried to think of something that we knew in our minds that we could do if we worked at it, but which seemed completely unimagineable at the moment. We both needed a bit of a kick-start in our lives, and this seemed like the way to do it. She came up with doing a triathlon next summer. I came up with running a marathon.
This, in 2009, is going to be my marathon. I have well over a year to train for it - enough time to prepare if I work at it consistently, not enough time to drag my feet. I have new running shoes and I've started my jogging training plan. I run three times a week for the next 8 weeks when I adjust my schedule based on my fitness level. By that time, my free York U gym membership will have kicked in.
So far I'm excited and feeling good - about everything. In this spirit, I present a new post tag, inspired by my unspeakable love for Simon Pegg: "Run, fatgirl, run."
All this to say, I'm resurrecting this blog. All previous entries from my India trip are now going to be tagged with "India" and archived. I'm hoping to post substantively at least once or twice a week, depending on how school is going. At the moment, I'm bursting with things I want to talk about - mostly the things I always talk about: politics, pop, and progress.
Stay tuned.
*Budgetary challenge not included.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
International Women's Day, my Dad's birthday, and Khajuraho
Kind of hard to bring those all together, so I won't.
Happy International Women's Day, in which, among other things, I pause and offer respect to the long line of smart, brave, and righteous babes, including our mothers and grandmothers, who've given us everything in the world. I'm grateful to inherit what they worked for, and to be part of the next generation (along with almost all of my friends) to use the F-word with pride. Check out what us smart young bitches is up to.
Happy birthday, Dad, and congrats on all the new directions the new year is bringing.
And I'm in Khajuraho, having a beer and a bhang lassi for all the girls back home, and for my Mom. You guys are amazing. Please be in Canada when I get home.
Mom, this is for you. Dolly never lies.
Real post in a few days.
Happy International Women's Day, in which, among other things, I pause and offer respect to the long line of smart, brave, and righteous babes, including our mothers and grandmothers, who've given us everything in the world. I'm grateful to inherit what they worked for, and to be part of the next generation (along with almost all of my friends) to use the F-word with pride. Check out what us smart young bitches is up to.
Happy birthday, Dad, and congrats on all the new directions the new year is bringing.
And I'm in Khajuraho, having a beer and a bhang lassi for all the girls back home, and for my Mom. You guys are amazing. Please be in Canada when I get home.
Mom, this is for you. Dolly never lies.
Real post in a few days.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Things I liked more and less about Agra
One minor train problem later, we're in Agra. This city is gaudy, at least all the areas we've seen, and I kind of like its total lack of tact. Congratulations to the touts at Fatehpur Sikri for being, by a wide margin, the most persistent we've seen so far. I seriously thought S. was going to smack this one kid, and was trying to figure out how to say "You are putting yourself in physical danger" in Hindi when the tourist police came and shooed him away. (Yes, there are special tourist police in India. They're the ones dressed like police, but not carrying AK-47-style guns.)
The Hindi is coming along, slowly. I can construct simple sentences and understand some of what I'm hearing if the speaker isn't talking a million miles a minute. They all speak directly to S., right away, barely acknowledging E. and I sometimes. I know it's probably mostly because he's Indian, but I get the sense that his being a he has something to do with it as well. The good thing is that it lets me sit back and listen to them trying to speak so that he can understand them. The bad thing is that it gives me few opportunities to speak it myself. I'm getting used to the pacing, the bubbling, front-of-the-mouth sound streams, catching the beats and the intonation. But it still feels like double dutch, and even though I've got the rhythm of the ropes clicking on the pavement, I'm stuck rocking back and forth and waiting for one opening big enough to jump in. Still, it's coming along.
I got really serious about it a few days ago in response to a straw-that-breaks type incident on our "7k hike" (truth: grim, shadeless death march at a 30-degree incline which we gave up on halfway) in which the three of us ended up surrounded by men who were transparently talking about us. I could understand some basic parts ("Two girls, one boy," "Where do you think they're from?") but couldn't follow it when the tones changed, got quieter and bolder, and into what S. assures us was very, very crude - not that we didn't know what was going on anyway. It drives me insane that people always think that speaking in another language means that no one can tell that they're being discussed; it's not true, you always can. Always always. Anyway, it really burns me that people can openly show us disrespect and we can't do anything about it, so I've gotten serious about learning the language. My goal is to be able to shock and humiliate one person before I leave who says something exceptionally disrespectful to us. (Of course, if no one else talks rudely about us, I won't get the chance - and no one would be happier than me if that were the case - but in the meantime I think I'll try to be prepared.)
Anyway. Agra.
We spent yesterday at Fatehpur Sikri, which was ultimately not that enjoyable. It's not that the buildings weren't great - they were - but between the heat (yeah, uh oh), the touts (as I said, in a class of their own) and the bugs.... good god, the bugs.... I was too distracted and uncomfortable to really absorb the scenery. I speak for myself here, but I think it probably applies to all of us. The entire place was like a solid, dense cloud of these tiny, fruit-fly type bugs. Because we were perspiring and wearing sunscreen (okay, only E. and I), walking through a cloud of them meant getting them stuck to your face, your neck, your arms, and all over your clothes. I have never seen so many insects in one place. The clouds were so dense they were a permanent haze across the complex. I made the mistake of wearing yellow, which apparently they were attracted to, so I ended up absolutely covered. It's taken two washes to get all the bugs out of my shirt.
But, nothing a cold shower didn't fix. Every shower here feels like the Best Shower Ever. People in Canada don't really need to shower, ever. They don't get dirty. Not actually dirty. You don't really know how dirty works until you come somewhere like India. You don't really need to wash your clothes, either. We do.
Had a mediocre dinner last night and a beer that the restaurant had to send a boy on a bike to go buy, and made us keep under our table when we weren't refilling our glasses. You can get beer everywhere here, but no one has a liquor license. I can understand that (cf: my previous post on Indian bureaucracy). It was hilarious, we felt bad. Kingfisher is the only widely available brand here, which - like most of what Indians drink - is sugary as hell. It also comes in 650ml bottles, so I suggest that any blossoming alcoholics steer clear. Came back to the hotel and stayed up late watching old American cartoons dubbed in Hindi - Johnny Bravo, even, and Tom and Jerry.
Got up at 5.30 this morning to be at the gates of the Taj at 6am when it opened. (Okay, 6.15.) May I recommend the Taj Mahal at dawn? It's hard to imagine a time that wouldn't be worth rising to see the building described by Nobel winner Rabindranath Tagore as "a tear on the face of eternity"* shift from muted pink-blue-greys in the predawn twilight through the autumnal colours of sunrise and into the blaring, pearly light of the daytime sun. The play of light, which in Moghul (Islamic) architecture is used to signify the presence of God, who is never directly represented, is one of the most interesting features of the Taj. It seems flat without the sun, all grey. From what we saw, I think it's at its best when the first bits of direct morning light hit it, giving it a third dimension and illuminating the Koranic script around the main arches. It's definitely the most subtle, and makes the brassy major chords of the full sun** feel a bit garish. Of course, that's only until you actually enter the buildling - when you come back out and look again, it's so white and so fine that you can't imagine it in any other lighting. I know I'll forget all of this, and the photos won't help at all.
In the inside of the mausoleum, you can't take photos, and that is a damn shame. You've seen a hundred photos of the Taj and you haven't seen the most beautiful part. Inside is a replica of the tombs of Shah Jahan, who built the thing, and his favourite wife, whose death inspired it. They're surrounded by a wall of carved marble that's cut so thin it's translucent, with incredibly detailed inlays of precious and semiprecious stones in long floral motifs that echo the ones on the front gate. There are also panels in this wall that are carved right through, and through which you can see the tomb-replicas - for such a hard material, the marble here managed to look incredibly soft, even malleable. The walls of the interior, which sit back about 15 feet from the wall around the tombs (which is only 5 feet high or so) are all, again, inlaid marble and Koranic text, rising right up to the full-height dome ceiling at the top of the structure. Beneath the replicas, the real tombs lie in the same positions, in undecorated wood coffins, in a permanently sealed and inaccessible room that, my guide says, smells of incense and roses.
The thing you can't capture, in photos or words, is how much soul is in the building. The expressiveness of the work is completely unlike any other building I've ever been in, and it's hard to explain exactly what that means. The thin alley of water in front of the Taj (in which you can see a reflection of the building, in a lot of famous photos) is actually just the North stream of four, which extend in four directions from a raised platform, and represent the four streams in the Muslim paradise. Apart from the restrained elegance of the detailing, which itself speaks volumes about beauty and loss, the interior layout of the mausoleum follows an old Islamic text about the layout of paradise - the sum of all of these details is that Jahan and his wife's tombs lie at the seat of God, but for one detail: they are slightly off-center, and in an obsessively symmetrical structure, we had all wondered why. I have a guess, on further thought: to lie beside, rather than in place of, the throne of God.
To say the least, I was moved by the interior. A little choked up, actually. There's just so much feeling coming together in such a small space: of love, of faith, of loss, of joy. All I could pull together in my mind at the time were random strands of poetry from god knows where... well, some I know. "where leap the wild, bereft deer" is from one of Phyllis Webb's Water and Light ghazals, for example. But I think the truth of the building reveals itself like that, like those strange flashes of recognition that happen in poetry, where something far too big to ever be articulated is channeled into a narrow phrase, a shorthand for the human, or even the sacred. My experience of the Taj had a lot in common with my experiences of poetry, at its best.
Well, this entry has gotten really out of control now, so I'll cut it off there, except to say that I've also finished Anil's Ghost and strongly suggest that if you haven't read it, you should, and that if you have read it, a second reading is definitely needed. I'm considering a third.
We leave tomorrow for Orccha, in Madhya Pradesh to the South, after which we'll be headed to Kajuraho and Pachmari, then hopefully back to Varanassi, if the trains work. We've had a really hard time working the trains to Varanassi, and the buses are just unsafe there. It's also a theft-heavy city, and E. and S. want to skip it entirely. I'm torn. Getting there really will be a nightmare. We'll see what happens.
Take care, all.
*Thank you, Rough Guide.
** Thank you, P.K. Page.
The Hindi is coming along, slowly. I can construct simple sentences and understand some of what I'm hearing if the speaker isn't talking a million miles a minute. They all speak directly to S., right away, barely acknowledging E. and I sometimes. I know it's probably mostly because he's Indian, but I get the sense that his being a he has something to do with it as well. The good thing is that it lets me sit back and listen to them trying to speak so that he can understand them. The bad thing is that it gives me few opportunities to speak it myself. I'm getting used to the pacing, the bubbling, front-of-the-mouth sound streams, catching the beats and the intonation. But it still feels like double dutch, and even though I've got the rhythm of the ropes clicking on the pavement, I'm stuck rocking back and forth and waiting for one opening big enough to jump in. Still, it's coming along.
I got really serious about it a few days ago in response to a straw-that-breaks type incident on our "7k hike" (truth: grim, shadeless death march at a 30-degree incline which we gave up on halfway) in which the three of us ended up surrounded by men who were transparently talking about us. I could understand some basic parts ("Two girls, one boy," "Where do you think they're from?") but couldn't follow it when the tones changed, got quieter and bolder, and into what S. assures us was very, very crude - not that we didn't know what was going on anyway. It drives me insane that people always think that speaking in another language means that no one can tell that they're being discussed; it's not true, you always can. Always always. Anyway, it really burns me that people can openly show us disrespect and we can't do anything about it, so I've gotten serious about learning the language. My goal is to be able to shock and humiliate one person before I leave who says something exceptionally disrespectful to us. (Of course, if no one else talks rudely about us, I won't get the chance - and no one would be happier than me if that were the case - but in the meantime I think I'll try to be prepared.)
Anyway. Agra.
We spent yesterday at Fatehpur Sikri, which was ultimately not that enjoyable. It's not that the buildings weren't great - they were - but between the heat (yeah, uh oh), the touts (as I said, in a class of their own) and the bugs.... good god, the bugs.... I was too distracted and uncomfortable to really absorb the scenery. I speak for myself here, but I think it probably applies to all of us. The entire place was like a solid, dense cloud of these tiny, fruit-fly type bugs. Because we were perspiring and wearing sunscreen (okay, only E. and I), walking through a cloud of them meant getting them stuck to your face, your neck, your arms, and all over your clothes. I have never seen so many insects in one place. The clouds were so dense they were a permanent haze across the complex. I made the mistake of wearing yellow, which apparently they were attracted to, so I ended up absolutely covered. It's taken two washes to get all the bugs out of my shirt.
But, nothing a cold shower didn't fix. Every shower here feels like the Best Shower Ever. People in Canada don't really need to shower, ever. They don't get dirty. Not actually dirty. You don't really know how dirty works until you come somewhere like India. You don't really need to wash your clothes, either. We do.
Had a mediocre dinner last night and a beer that the restaurant had to send a boy on a bike to go buy, and made us keep under our table when we weren't refilling our glasses. You can get beer everywhere here, but no one has a liquor license. I can understand that (cf: my previous post on Indian bureaucracy). It was hilarious, we felt bad. Kingfisher is the only widely available brand here, which - like most of what Indians drink - is sugary as hell. It also comes in 650ml bottles, so I suggest that any blossoming alcoholics steer clear. Came back to the hotel and stayed up late watching old American cartoons dubbed in Hindi - Johnny Bravo, even, and Tom and Jerry.
Got up at 5.30 this morning to be at the gates of the Taj at 6am when it opened. (Okay, 6.15.) May I recommend the Taj Mahal at dawn? It's hard to imagine a time that wouldn't be worth rising to see the building described by Nobel winner Rabindranath Tagore as "a tear on the face of eternity"* shift from muted pink-blue-greys in the predawn twilight through the autumnal colours of sunrise and into the blaring, pearly light of the daytime sun. The play of light, which in Moghul (Islamic) architecture is used to signify the presence of God, who is never directly represented, is one of the most interesting features of the Taj. It seems flat without the sun, all grey. From what we saw, I think it's at its best when the first bits of direct morning light hit it, giving it a third dimension and illuminating the Koranic script around the main arches. It's definitely the most subtle, and makes the brassy major chords of the full sun** feel a bit garish. Of course, that's only until you actually enter the buildling - when you come back out and look again, it's so white and so fine that you can't imagine it in any other lighting. I know I'll forget all of this, and the photos won't help at all.
In the inside of the mausoleum, you can't take photos, and that is a damn shame. You've seen a hundred photos of the Taj and you haven't seen the most beautiful part. Inside is a replica of the tombs of Shah Jahan, who built the thing, and his favourite wife, whose death inspired it. They're surrounded by a wall of carved marble that's cut so thin it's translucent, with incredibly detailed inlays of precious and semiprecious stones in long floral motifs that echo the ones on the front gate. There are also panels in this wall that are carved right through, and through which you can see the tomb-replicas - for such a hard material, the marble here managed to look incredibly soft, even malleable. The walls of the interior, which sit back about 15 feet from the wall around the tombs (which is only 5 feet high or so) are all, again, inlaid marble and Koranic text, rising right up to the full-height dome ceiling at the top of the structure. Beneath the replicas, the real tombs lie in the same positions, in undecorated wood coffins, in a permanently sealed and inaccessible room that, my guide says, smells of incense and roses.
The thing you can't capture, in photos or words, is how much soul is in the building. The expressiveness of the work is completely unlike any other building I've ever been in, and it's hard to explain exactly what that means. The thin alley of water in front of the Taj (in which you can see a reflection of the building, in a lot of famous photos) is actually just the North stream of four, which extend in four directions from a raised platform, and represent the four streams in the Muslim paradise. Apart from the restrained elegance of the detailing, which itself speaks volumes about beauty and loss, the interior layout of the mausoleum follows an old Islamic text about the layout of paradise - the sum of all of these details is that Jahan and his wife's tombs lie at the seat of God, but for one detail: they are slightly off-center, and in an obsessively symmetrical structure, we had all wondered why. I have a guess, on further thought: to lie beside, rather than in place of, the throne of God.
To say the least, I was moved by the interior. A little choked up, actually. There's just so much feeling coming together in such a small space: of love, of faith, of loss, of joy. All I could pull together in my mind at the time were random strands of poetry from god knows where... well, some I know. "where leap the wild, bereft deer" is from one of Phyllis Webb's Water and Light ghazals, for example. But I think the truth of the building reveals itself like that, like those strange flashes of recognition that happen in poetry, where something far too big to ever be articulated is channeled into a narrow phrase, a shorthand for the human, or even the sacred. My experience of the Taj had a lot in common with my experiences of poetry, at its best.
Well, this entry has gotten really out of control now, so I'll cut it off there, except to say that I've also finished Anil's Ghost and strongly suggest that if you haven't read it, you should, and that if you have read it, a second reading is definitely needed. I'm considering a third.
We leave tomorrow for Orccha, in Madhya Pradesh to the South, after which we'll be headed to Kajuraho and Pachmari, then hopefully back to Varanassi, if the trains work. We've had a really hard time working the trains to Varanassi, and the buses are just unsafe there. It's also a theft-heavy city, and E. and S. want to skip it entirely. I'm torn. Getting there really will be a nightmare. We'll see what happens.
Take care, all.
*Thank you, Rough Guide.
** Thank you, P.K. Page.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
3 different kinds of pain
Oscular pain, muscular pain, and dermatological pain!
All in what you would technically describe as the "assal" region. Camels are boney, rocky, chafey, smelly buggers, but oh man was that fun.
Because I only have a half hour before my hour of internet is over, we'll keep this short.
Meaning, in list form:
SOME THINGS I'D LIKE TO REMEMBER ABOUT CAMELS:
- phenomenal patience, tough skins
- very bouncy at a trot
- with long necks and solemn eyes, they feel closer to a dinosaur at times than a horse
- more frequent defecation than any animal I'm aware of
- they require the co-operation of every muscle in your ass, legs and torso in order to walk comfortably... you must stay very loose in the hips and, well, everywhere
- saddles possess supernatural ass-blistering powers
- when in heat, they puff their tongues out the sides of their mouths and inflate them with foul, camel-smelling, gurgly air
- are gurgly creatures in general
- splay legs comically when eating, peeing
- will make you smell like camel.
(Bonus: - are spooked by old Soviet tanks)
And, that's most of the story right there. Except for the part where we parked (our camels) on the dunes, watched the sun set, and stared into the black parts of the sky as the stars appeared in the Thar desert. We camped out on the dunes and learned to make (well, roll) chapatis. In short, it was just beautiful.
E. wishes to point out that she made shadow puppets with the moonlight, which was unbelievably bright. And all of this is true.
But holy shit are we sore today. I didn't have stirrups on my camel for the first bit, and so was stuck using the thigh-clamping method of staying on top of the camel. Staying on top of the camel is most of what you do while on the camel. The remaining 3% of your energy is spent looking around. What you see is amazing, of course. It just leaves your inner thighs, butt muscles, back and stomach muscles, tailbone, and skin on your rear in bad shape.
For the rest, I guess, wait for the photos. Which we meant to upload tonight, but we don't have our photo keys with us, so, sorry. We got some great ones though.
We're sad to be leaving Jaisalmer - not because there's much left to do, but because it's so beautiful. But at 6am tomorrow we're busing to Bikaner and then catching a train to Chandigarh, where S. will graciously be meeting us, again, at the godless hour of 6am. That, we're very much looking forward to.
It'll be a few days before we blog again. Take care, all. Wish every one of you could have been there last night on the dunes.
All in what you would technically describe as the "assal" region. Camels are boney, rocky, chafey, smelly buggers, but oh man was that fun.
Because I only have a half hour before my hour of internet is over, we'll keep this short.
Meaning, in list form:
SOME THINGS I'D LIKE TO REMEMBER ABOUT CAMELS:
- phenomenal patience, tough skins
- very bouncy at a trot
- with long necks and solemn eyes, they feel closer to a dinosaur at times than a horse
- more frequent defecation than any animal I'm aware of
- they require the co-operation of every muscle in your ass, legs and torso in order to walk comfortably... you must stay very loose in the hips and, well, everywhere
- saddles possess supernatural ass-blistering powers
- when in heat, they puff their tongues out the sides of their mouths and inflate them with foul, camel-smelling, gurgly air
- are gurgly creatures in general
- splay legs comically when eating, peeing
- will make you smell like camel.
(Bonus: - are spooked by old Soviet tanks)
And, that's most of the story right there. Except for the part where we parked (our camels) on the dunes, watched the sun set, and stared into the black parts of the sky as the stars appeared in the Thar desert. We camped out on the dunes and learned to make (well, roll) chapatis. In short, it was just beautiful.
E. wishes to point out that she made shadow puppets with the moonlight, which was unbelievably bright. And all of this is true.
But holy shit are we sore today. I didn't have stirrups on my camel for the first bit, and so was stuck using the thigh-clamping method of staying on top of the camel. Staying on top of the camel is most of what you do while on the camel. The remaining 3% of your energy is spent looking around. What you see is amazing, of course. It just leaves your inner thighs, butt muscles, back and stomach muscles, tailbone, and skin on your rear in bad shape.
For the rest, I guess, wait for the photos. Which we meant to upload tonight, but we don't have our photo keys with us, so, sorry. We got some great ones though.
We're sad to be leaving Jaisalmer - not because there's much left to do, but because it's so beautiful. But at 6am tomorrow we're busing to Bikaner and then catching a train to Chandigarh, where S. will graciously be meeting us, again, at the godless hour of 6am. That, we're very much looking forward to.
It'll be a few days before we blog again. Take care, all. Wish every one of you could have been there last night on the dunes.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Troubling predeparture conversations
A: "Where are you flying into?"
me: "Delhi."
A: .....
me: "What?"
A: "You know how people say nothing can prepare you for India? When they say that, they mean Delhi."
me: "I thought when they said that, they meant Mumbai...."
Oh well. They probably meant both, and that's just fine.
So I've set myself up this space to post while on the road, partially as a record for myself and partially to avoid assaulting you all unnecessarily with 'update' emails.
I've been doing some thinking about why I'm doing this trip, why I'm doing it now, and what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's been a strange thing to think through; it's hardly unusual anymore for my demographic to go places our parents would have been unlikely to choose, and for long periods of time. It sort of feels in some ways that travelling outside of North America and Western Europe (I have yet to hear a satisfactory term for this group of areas, probably with good reason) has become for our generation what the two-months-in-Europe-after-graduation trip was for previous generations (though, of course, plenty of us still opt for Europe). I wonder what both of these mean. I certainly see myself wanting many of the same things, and probably sinking myself into similar problems.
People have tended to react to my trip in one of two ways. The first, which tends to come from the older generation, is a mix of cautious support and curiosity as to why in the world anyone would choose India as a destination. (Early email a concerned family member: "Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Austria. Even Hungary. All these countries have bathrooms in them. And did you know that India was right beside Pakistan? I'm sure you didn't." [NB: I did.]) I haven't really been able to explain it to anyone who's had this reaction, and don't expect I'll be able to. The second reaction, which has usually come from my own generation (and community) has been one of total understanding and excitement.
There is, however, a difficult subset of this group, who follow up their approval with a question to the effect of, "Are you going there as a spiritual journey?"
That question sends me off in a million directions. My gut wants to say no; I'm not expecting some mystical experience to happen; I feel like this question comes from an embarassingly orientalist set of ideas about what India is; I have never had a moment of transcendence triggered by bright colours, a foreign language, or the smell of incense or curry* here, and don't really expect it to work any differently there; I feel that human beings are basically the same everywhere, and I don't expect any one or group of people overseas to answer my questions any more than I expect anyone here to; that it's not appropriate to look at other parts of the world (or anyone else) as answers to the parts of ourselves that remain mysterious.
But I also know that that answer is disingenuous. First, of course I believe that we do define ourselves with and against others, and that on some level, you need to allow yourself to do that in order to accept other people's humanity - at its best, it's an act of sympathy. Second, although it's easy for me to say that I'm not seeking any kind of religious experience, spirituality is an entirely different question.
I consider myself a spiritual agnostic. I'm moved by beauty, by suffering, by justice, by history. I'm moved by chaos and paradox. In this spirit, I can say that the last few years have been a profoundly disorienting and grounding experience for me; I believe strongly that the organizing principle of the world and of life is chaos (mantra #1: "crazy shit happens all the time") and that this needn't dislodge our sense of self and justice (mantra #2: "don't be a dick"). Trying to understand my place in this world, and in history, has become very spiritual.
And this trip has a lot to do, for me, with locating myself within these things. Our generation does not have the option of ignoring the non-Western world, and we have good reason to be angry with our parents (where applicable) for doing so. I think I'm drawn to India, specifically, because it strikes me as a particularly hard place to rationally come to terms with; it doesn't fall easily into the "developing world" paradigm that gets applied so liberally** to anyplace that doesn't have easily visible markers of 'advanced democracy' and ' late capitalism,' and allows us to, for example, talk about areas as bafflingly varied as "Africa" and "South Asia" as if they were homogenous. Without having been there yet, India (and here I do mean the whole of India) encapsulates something for me about both the mechanics of the world and our moment in history, and I think this comes from the contraditions and multiplicity of things it contains. Within four months, and within a single nation, I'm going to see some of the oldest structures on the planet (some of which predate the Roman ruins by hundreds, even thousands of years), and then move on to a few cities which are becoming some of the most important technological and economic hubs in the world. India is a constitutionally secular society which has been dealing with issues of religious and regional plurality (with varied degrees of success) since long before Canada was a twinkle in some British lord's eye. Not to mention the issues of population management, which will become a serious global concern over the next century, not only due to the increasing global population but due to scarcity of resource concerns, displacement due to climate change and...
Well, I could go on, but I'll save all of that for the road. In the meantime, I'll be trying not to think every experience into some abstract comment on the cosmos and its relation to worldly justice, and to see the places I'm going to as openly as I can, and for what they are. This is by no means the end of my reservations, intentions, hopes, or assumptions.
In closing, a word on the title of this blog: last year I read Anne McClintock's brilliant article, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonial," which got me thinking in a serious way about the current prevalence of the prefix post-. We're stuck, we're told, in a culture*** that's post-modern, post-capitalist, post-communistic, post-democratic, post-feminist (yuck), post-9/11, post-just-about-every-movement-that-has-tried-to-take-the-world-seriously. Post-colonial, of course. McClintock's insights about the way these terms obscure our ability to talk about so many problems that still exist are great, and I won't repeat them. But I think what all this adds up to is a sense of floating in a void, of being disconnected from what's happening around us and in the places we can't see, and of feeling like no one's contributions are meaningful. I worry that the term that's missing from this list, and is the sum of all those terms, is post-responsibility. One major artistic theme of the twentieth century was our individual dislocation from history, our inability to see any semblance of ourselves in the stories of the past, and how that prevents us from seeing and telling the stories of the present, and worse, of the future. I think this view requites an awful inflexibility in the way we look at history; it may not happen on horseback anymore, but I'm not sure it ever really did.
I want to work through these ideas; I think the post is bullshit. I think we all need to get back into our bodies, back into history. I think I'm going to India on a spiritual quest to confront the question of where and who I am, and where and who we all are.
(Of course, I also enjoy the pun on traditional mail; these are my letters to you, which appropriately enough will come electronically rather than by the actual, traditional post.)
And, of course of course, the 'comments' button is at the bottom of each post for a reason.
* Okay, so I've had some pretty transcendent curries... but I think this has more to do with how badly the traditional Anglo-Saxon diet accomodates vegetarians than some spiritual property inherent to the spice. I'll let you know later whether this was, in fact, curry witchcraft.
** Wording deliberate.
*** Few words make me cringe harder than "culture," but there it is.
me: "Delhi."
A: .....
me: "What?"
A: "You know how people say nothing can prepare you for India? When they say that, they mean Delhi."
me: "I thought when they said that, they meant Mumbai...."
Oh well. They probably meant both, and that's just fine.
So I've set myself up this space to post while on the road, partially as a record for myself and partially to avoid assaulting you all unnecessarily with 'update' emails.
I've been doing some thinking about why I'm doing this trip, why I'm doing it now, and what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's been a strange thing to think through; it's hardly unusual anymore for my demographic to go places our parents would have been unlikely to choose, and for long periods of time. It sort of feels in some ways that travelling outside of North America and Western Europe (I have yet to hear a satisfactory term for this group of areas, probably with good reason) has become for our generation what the two-months-in-Europe-after-graduation trip was for previous generations (though, of course, plenty of us still opt for Europe). I wonder what both of these mean. I certainly see myself wanting many of the same things, and probably sinking myself into similar problems.
People have tended to react to my trip in one of two ways. The first, which tends to come from the older generation, is a mix of cautious support and curiosity as to why in the world anyone would choose India as a destination. (Early email a concerned family member: "Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Austria. Even Hungary. All these countries have bathrooms in them. And did you know that India was right beside Pakistan? I'm sure you didn't." [NB: I did.]) I haven't really been able to explain it to anyone who's had this reaction, and don't expect I'll be able to. The second reaction, which has usually come from my own generation (and community) has been one of total understanding and excitement.
There is, however, a difficult subset of this group, who follow up their approval with a question to the effect of, "Are you going there as a spiritual journey?"
That question sends me off in a million directions. My gut wants to say no; I'm not expecting some mystical experience to happen; I feel like this question comes from an embarassingly orientalist set of ideas about what India is; I have never had a moment of transcendence triggered by bright colours, a foreign language, or the smell of incense or curry* here, and don't really expect it to work any differently there; I feel that human beings are basically the same everywhere, and I don't expect any one or group of people overseas to answer my questions any more than I expect anyone here to; that it's not appropriate to look at other parts of the world (or anyone else) as answers to the parts of ourselves that remain mysterious.
But I also know that that answer is disingenuous. First, of course I believe that we do define ourselves with and against others, and that on some level, you need to allow yourself to do that in order to accept other people's humanity - at its best, it's an act of sympathy. Second, although it's easy for me to say that I'm not seeking any kind of religious experience, spirituality is an entirely different question.
I consider myself a spiritual agnostic. I'm moved by beauty, by suffering, by justice, by history. I'm moved by chaos and paradox. In this spirit, I can say that the last few years have been a profoundly disorienting and grounding experience for me; I believe strongly that the organizing principle of the world and of life is chaos (mantra #1: "crazy shit happens all the time") and that this needn't dislodge our sense of self and justice (mantra #2: "don't be a dick"). Trying to understand my place in this world, and in history, has become very spiritual.
And this trip has a lot to do, for me, with locating myself within these things. Our generation does not have the option of ignoring the non-Western world, and we have good reason to be angry with our parents (where applicable) for doing so. I think I'm drawn to India, specifically, because it strikes me as a particularly hard place to rationally come to terms with; it doesn't fall easily into the "developing world" paradigm that gets applied so liberally** to anyplace that doesn't have easily visible markers of 'advanced democracy' and ' late capitalism,' and allows us to, for example, talk about areas as bafflingly varied as "Africa" and "South Asia" as if they were homogenous. Without having been there yet, India (and here I do mean the whole of India) encapsulates something for me about both the mechanics of the world and our moment in history, and I think this comes from the contraditions and multiplicity of things it contains. Within four months, and within a single nation, I'm going to see some of the oldest structures on the planet (some of which predate the Roman ruins by hundreds, even thousands of years), and then move on to a few cities which are becoming some of the most important technological and economic hubs in the world. India is a constitutionally secular society which has been dealing with issues of religious and regional plurality (with varied degrees of success) since long before Canada was a twinkle in some British lord's eye. Not to mention the issues of population management, which will become a serious global concern over the next century, not only due to the increasing global population but due to scarcity of resource concerns, displacement due to climate change and...
Well, I could go on, but I'll save all of that for the road. In the meantime, I'll be trying not to think every experience into some abstract comment on the cosmos and its relation to worldly justice, and to see the places I'm going to as openly as I can, and for what they are. This is by no means the end of my reservations, intentions, hopes, or assumptions.
In closing, a word on the title of this blog: last year I read Anne McClintock's brilliant article, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonial," which got me thinking in a serious way about the current prevalence of the prefix post-. We're stuck, we're told, in a culture*** that's post-modern, post-capitalist, post-communistic, post-democratic, post-feminist (yuck), post-9/11, post-just-about-every-movement-that-has-tried-to-take-the-world-seriously. Post-colonial, of course. McClintock's insights about the way these terms obscure our ability to talk about so many problems that still exist are great, and I won't repeat them. But I think what all this adds up to is a sense of floating in a void, of being disconnected from what's happening around us and in the places we can't see, and of feeling like no one's contributions are meaningful. I worry that the term that's missing from this list, and is the sum of all those terms, is post-responsibility. One major artistic theme of the twentieth century was our individual dislocation from history, our inability to see any semblance of ourselves in the stories of the past, and how that prevents us from seeing and telling the stories of the present, and worse, of the future. I think this view requites an awful inflexibility in the way we look at history; it may not happen on horseback anymore, but I'm not sure it ever really did.
I want to work through these ideas; I think the post is bullshit. I think we all need to get back into our bodies, back into history. I think I'm going to India on a spiritual quest to confront the question of where and who I am, and where and who we all are.
(Of course, I also enjoy the pun on traditional mail; these are my letters to you, which appropriately enough will come electronically rather than by the actual, traditional post.)
And, of course of course, the 'comments' button is at the bottom of each post for a reason.
* Okay, so I've had some pretty transcendent curries... but I think this has more to do with how badly the traditional Anglo-Saxon diet accomodates vegetarians than some spiritual property inherent to the spice. I'll let you know later whether this was, in fact, curry witchcraft.
** Wording deliberate.
*** Few words make me cringe harder than "culture," but there it is.
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