Wander the World

mistress mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

2010-05-23T00:45:00.001-04:00

walking through my garden still makes me philosophical, introspective, incites me still to seek mental refuge. i haven't been back there for almost 2 years. but today, some mixture of the sun, the clouds, and the smell of the earth through the screen door beckoned me back...

when we moved into this house in january of 2007, we knew that the backyard would be the best part. it's huge, a massive, elongated tract of land, edged at the end with tall trees and a bamboo grove. my brothers and i played memorable games of football and cricket back there, and in the light-darkness of summer, we played "capture the flag" with torches and our cousins in tow. for our parents' anniversary, we surprised them with a porch swing that seats 3, complete with awning and cushions, and a table and chairs for the deck. summer evenings we ate dinner outside every night, and weekend mornings, pancakes were consumed in our pajamas on the deck. we caught summer fireflies in jars, slipped in mud behind the evergreens, set up a tent and sleeping bags outside, or simply lay on our backs in the grass and watched clouds pass over the sun and stars pass by the moon...

two glorious summers...but the best part for me alone was the surprising effusion of flowers, planted and forgotten, on the left side of the yard. our predecessors in this house had planted all number of flowers - small blooms that looked like hearts when they were buds and bloomed into little pink stars, climbing red, pink, and white roses, orange lilies, bluebells. for every week of the summer months, new flowers would sprout up and out, and i would cut some to bring into the house, so that we had flowers in vases all summer long.

i didn't do it last summer.

they would have bloomed, forgotten and tucked away in that corner of the yard this summer as well. but a rosebush happened to catch my eye this morning, and clouds came and went in thick hordes, promising inevitable rain, and in an instant, i grabbed the garden shears and ran out the door.

you have to wade through a sea of grass first, smelling freshly cut, and as you pass to the side, the flowers in the clearing become more visible. we've had so much rain this year that the grass is greener than usual, and the flowers hardier. we've never had so many roses, and as i cut and stacked flowers on the grass, i found myself thinking about the nature of things.

i read somewhere, in a religious text (either Quran or Hadith, i can't remember which) that when good people die, the skies weep. having lost my brother, maybe i perceive that there's been more rain than usual...storms, wind, pouring rain. the skies have wept and the ground has been soaked. the rain used to bother me - there's a part of you that still attributes a person's soul to the body that carried it, forgetting that the body is simply a vessel, a means. and i was a protective older sister...rain reminded me that my little brother was alone, had always been afraid of rain and lightning and thunder, and was now buried outside, exposed to the elements. gradually, i've weened myself away from this idea. but every time it rains now, it's as if the skies are weeping for him.

and yet...that rain has created more beauty than existed before. the roses are stronger, the flowers have increased in number. so i see a metaphor in my garden, and it suddenly means more to me than it did before: i see that only the most beautiful roses are cut before their time, to be admired at closer proximity; that hardship, like rain to the flowers, makes us stronger; that the essence of a beautiful flower, the smell and touch of it, extends beyond its mere frame and remains etched in the subconscious of our senses; that the inexorable pull of time means flowers will bloom, wither, and fade year in and year out, whether we stop to look at them or not...

on grief

2010-04-27T11:50:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, growing up alone. She wrapped around herself a world of words and pages, of musty library books smelling of all the minds they had touched before, of ancient, enduring wisdom, of paper and sawdust and the deep green forests that lay beyond the pages, stretching in her imagination all the way to the sea. She hid herself away in nooks and corners, behind a sofa, beneath a sheet draped over a bunk bed, weaving in her own childish way, little worlds.

But she wished desperately for siblings.

And then one day, when she was eleven, her twin brothers were born, and she emerged into a world of light and laughter and joy, keeping with her the in a separate corner the world of imagination she relied on.

Together, the three of them grew up, grew older, grew closer. Until one day the unthinkable happened.

Christmas Eve, 2008, one brother grew very sick. Suddenly, without warning, at the age of 14, he fell asleep, and for four months, they kept vigil by his side. At times he looked serene and calm, at others violently disturbed, like a version of sleeping beauty gone terribly wrong. They slept each night in fear of the morning and woke each morning with a dread for the day. He grew paler and weaker, all bones and bedsores. And then, one morning, he was gone.

She retreated, stung and hurt, a piece of her heart cut away forever, pushing away from everything. She stopped writing, she stopped reading, she stopped. She relives in her mind images of four horrific, agonizing months until she feels a madness overtake her. She goes through the motions, goes to work, comes home, performs tasks automatically, numb. About a year on, she remembers her brother’s love of words, remembers how much of herself she saw in him, sees before her the other brother, the one who survived. And so, she picks herself up. She writes again.

That girl is back. That girl is me.

autumn

2008-10-24T13:07:00.003-04:00

autumn is officially here (i prefer to call it “autumn” and not “fall,” “fall” being entirely too inelegant a word for this most regal of seasons – spring is too adolescent, summer too self-assured and cocky, and winter is like the incontinent older relative, who shits himself embarrassingly, all white, powdery profusion).

october means halloween, which i love and which the rest of my family hates. i grew up reading all the books that eventually became horror movies, letting the genre play tricks with my already overactive imagination in ways that the movies never could (though a viewing of “pet sematary” at the tender age of 8 freaked me out for years…i saw it again this past weekend, and it was just ridiculous). novels of choice during the adolescent years were christopher pikes and r.l. stine’s “fear street” series. in high school, i graduated to stephen king, and classic gothic novels like “jane eyre” and “rebecca.” my favorite halloween book (and subsequent animated movie) is ray bradbury’s “the halloween tree.”

so the theme for this month’s reading was horror. i read stephen king’s “the shining” and "salem's lot" (and couldn't sleep for two nights straight afterwards because i kept hearing scratching at my window). i reread bradbury’s “halloween tree” and “from the dust returned” and “something wicked this way comes” (funny, most people see him as only a sci fi novelist – read the sentimentality of “dandelion wine” and you’ll see much more). i've still to read henry james’ “the turn of the screw," neil gaiman’s new book “the graveyard book,” the unfiltered “grimm’s fairy tales” (which are horrific in their pure form), and john connolly’s “the book of lost things.”

autumn also means i need to change my phone again (my plan always comes due in september), which is depressing to the extreme. there's a blog post on cell phone systems in america vs. germany in my brain somewhere, i just have to shake it out. also need to write about tv (which i've been watching way too much of recently...well, more than usual).

also need to catch up on my 30-day timeline for NaNoWriMo (november 1st!).

expat syndrome, take 487

2008-09-23T22:53:00.002-04:00

one of the most debilitating side effects of the expat syndrome is trying to reconcile oneself to the fact that the people you love are spread out over countries, over continents. that’s the thing that makes you most restless, no matter which place you’re in – there’s always going to be someone missing.
lying in bed last night, going through a “what if” in my mind: what if i had never attended that very first fachschafts meeting? what if i were one of the many foreign students who never really got involved in german university life? what if i hadn’t spoken to that other american girl in my history class? thinking back even further, how was it that i ended up hearing about the first fachschafts meeting with my (at the time) limited and somewhat nervous understanding of german, or picking an obscure class on british royalty, or making friends with a Romanian during my international students orientation? without these happenings, i would have been a lost soul.

that first day, i was confused out of my mind – in the american university system, classes are chosen months in advance, with priority given according to seniority. as freshmen and sophomores, we got the bottom-of-the-barrel pickings, and had to scramble even for those. it meant that the day before our registration could officially begin, we stayed up until midnight so as to be the first ones online, clogging up the online registration system in order to get the classes of our choice. so the day of the ersti einfuehrung, i kept asking people how we would pick our classes, frantic that i would miss out on the good ones. it took three explanations from the people explaining the course selection booklet to us for me to finally get that in heidelberg, you picked the classes you wanted and just showed up. and precisely at that moment, when the foreigner fog in my brain cleared away to yield some semblance of sanity, i heard one of the tutors mention that there would be a “fachschaftstreff” that night, and anyone interested should stop by the fachschafts café at 6 pm.

i went to the café, a small room with sofas and wild political posters and one sole computer, windows which looked out onto the building right next door, a few chairs, and no sign of coffee. the sofas were old and soft, worn, with a particular smell (not a bad one), bright orange and knobbly. it was a new place for me at the time, but would become so familiar, my second home in between classes when my apartment was too far to walk to. it was too hot in the summer, just right in the winter because of the small white baseboard heaters along the wall. if you were the first one that day to go to the café, and it was locked, you made your way upstairs to the pforte (a small reception room), right in front of the political science library and handed over your student id in exchange for the key to the café. others would trickle in, always the same crowd, most of us part of the either the fachschaftsrat (the 7 elected student board members of the council) or the fachschaftssumpf (i never did figure out what sumpf meant, but knew somehow that it was a.) slang and b.) meant something like “the rest of us” or “the mass, the crowd”). we’d use the computer, take naps, read newspapers, eat, meet, gossip, and goof off. it became for us a small point of commonality within the swirl of a mid-sized city. everyone knew everything about everyone else – word traveled like wildfire amongst the sumpf, and because of it, we (some of us fondly, others in aggravation) called heidelberg a small dorf.

you meet every person twice.

the first meeting is mostly inconsequential. sometimes, the first few meetings remain so. if the person becomes merely a friend, those first meaningless meetings remain largely forgotten. if that person becomes a beloved friend or a lover, an unexpected confidante or a surrogate family member, you strive to retain those memories of when you barely knew each other, laugh at those meetings that seemed unimportant. because somewhere in there, there is an epiphany. another inconsequential meeting from a misinterpretation which ends in a night-long conversation and general mayhem; a fully sincere and loving (and totally unexpected) bear hug during a protest; a shared double-espresso before the 7 am class you both reached after staying up all night to watch the sunrise; a class on queen elizabeth I, where you discover another expat exactly like yourself. in that first fachschaftssitzung, and in subsequent meetings and partings to follow, i met those people who make up my second family.

when i lived in germany, further apart from my parents and brothers than i had ever been, there were moments when i missed them terribly. during holidays of course, when our whole extended family would get together, certain nights after a day that had not gone well at all, that horrendous summer when it seemed like they all fell frighteningly ill (one of the boys broke his arm in june, the second was hospitalized for 2 months with a high fever which the doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of, and dad was rushed to the emergency room because of what everyone thought was a heart attack, and which ended up being a kidney stone that he needed surgery for). things reminded me of them at every turn, something which remained internalized, and unbeknownst to me, that internalization continues today, reaching out to the people who are also like my family. if they hurt, if they’re upset or lonely or scared, if they’ve had a rough summer where nothing seemed to go right, i worry about them for days on end – whether they’re in germany or israel, sri lanka, argentina, australia, or deepest africa. i know they’ll be fine, i know they’ll work through it, but there is also an underlying sense of guilt – helplessness in the fact that i can’t be there for them, even if they themselves don’t really need me to be.

expats never remain happy in one place if people are missing. but at least they can content themselves with having those people in their lives, with having met them in the first place…

misanthrope

2008-08-22T16:36:00.003-04:00

in my line of work, you learn that people lie. they cheat and deceive. they're miserable and rude, without recourse or consequence. they hold in their heads simultaneous hypocrisy, claiming open-mindedness and whispering bigotry.

some people are just stupid fuckers.

but other people - the rare, the few - can be absolute angels.

it's nice when you find one of those other people. just saying.

distance and proximity

2008-08-20T21:16:00.003-04:00

recently, i tried to get together for dinner or a movie with one of my oldest friends. she lives in town a, which is a 30-minute drive from me in town b. distances have never been an issue - far-flung pastures are part of the american way of life. that's why we drive suv's and use up a large chunk of the earth's natural oil supply. but given that i work in town c, which is about 45 minutes away from her in town a, this is how our conversation went:

me: "hey, we need to get together."
her: "definitely! it's been waaaaay too long."
me: "we need a break!"
her: "we need to get together and vent!!"
me: (excited) "oh, by the way, they're playing 'brideshead revisited' not far from where i work! we both wanted to see that right?"
her: (pausing) "well, i was thinking we could meet at the bookstore near my house."
me: (calculating mileage in my head) "oh. hmmmm. maybe we could meet halfway?"
her: "yeah, how about the applebees in the middle?"
me and her, simultaneously after a silent pause: "still too far."
me: (sigh)
her: "yeah. damn gas prices."

i miss personal contact. i miss my cafe coffees and hot chocolates with friends in the highly accesible town square. i miss riding the bus or the bahn or the metro. i miss seeing a different country after taking two meager steps out of my own. i'm sure my european friends and relatives are feeling rather smug right now, about their wonderful public transportation systems and the cleverness of town planning by their european ancestors. yeah well, we've got purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain - i've never seen 'em, but i hear we've got 'em. and they're great for making ethanol.

2008-07-25T13:08:00.005-04:00

we always went at night. during the day, we dreamed...

it's been almost 10 years since my last visit to my uncle in jeddah - 10 years also since i last went to mecca. i was there in the summer of '99, so my memories may no longer be accurate, and since saudi is usually at its most alive at night, the things i've seen can't be trusted either. images and people and places become blurred at night, their harsher edges photoshopped out by the darkness.
any stray warm breeze will remind me of saudi - as will palm trees and monuments and highway centerpieces at roundabouts. like most of the surrounding area, saudi is scorching hot in the summer, and contrary to popular belief, those all-concealing abayas (the black shapeless robes that saudi women wear over their clothing...or in some cases, over next to nothing...) are great at deflecting the sun's rays. i don't wear the hijab (the tradtional female muslim head covering) but unlike many of my contemporaries who find it beneath them or hypocritical to wear one while in a country that dictates it as mandatory, or at a muslim gathering where it is simply a token of respect, i'm comfortable with putting it on when the situation calls for it. after all, i put it on to pray five times a day - what harm could there possibly be in wearing it out of respect for the sensibilities of an entire people?

rarely would we venture out during the day - when we did, we walked a few streets down from my uncle's house to the line of shops selling cloth, and then to the tailor's, to get clothes made out of that cloth. my mother and my aunt would usually buy some snack from the street vendors - i'm a firm believer that lack of hygiene is actually what gives those street foods in countries like pakistan and saudi arabia the certain indescribable and irresistible flavor which cannot be duplicated. you KNOW it'll probably give you an upset stomach afterwards, but you have to eat it anyway.

most of our outings are at night, when the desert air is cooler and more forgiving. out to the huge mall in jeddah's city center, or for dinner at a favorite restaurant, ice cream afterwards. all over the city there are constant reminders that this is a muslim country: the many street roundabouts are adorned with monuments of arabic calligraphy, verses from the quran and sayings from arab tradition. men with their white robes and checkered red or black head coverings, women in their abayas and burqas and hijabs, all in fluttering black, their eyes expressive and twinkling. yet despite the traditional context, jeddah is still unmistakably cosmopolitan. mecca is a different story.

one night out of our trip will be planned for ummrah, the shortened pilgrimage to mecca. we'll try to sleep during the day, and if we doze off in the darkened family room that serves as a quasi-guest room during our stay, we dream. my aunt would wake us at 8 or 9 pm, and we would eat the amazing food she would have silently and swiftly prepared before preparing for the night. for the men, a single unstitched piece of white cloth to cover their whole body (i still don't know how they managed to get them to stay - my uncle is an expert at wrapping and securing this white cloth), to signify that each man is equal. for my mom and i, usually a shalwar kameez with a chador wrapped securely around our heads. and then we would pile into my uncle's old station wagon in the darkness and speed off towards mecca.

the highways are empty and long, stretching along desert, punctuated by bright street lights. every once in awhile, there will be a monument of some sort: a sculpture of two palm trees, intertwined and connecting over our heads as they cross from either side of the highway, swords crossed in similar fashion. at the checkpoint, the guards will check our passports, ask a few questions, send us along our way. a few miles later, we enter the city.

it's dark, and the street looks like one of those downward sloping curvy roads you'd normally find in san fransisco. there are buildings lining the road, and cars parked along the sides next to sidewalks. at some point, the road becomes rougher and cobblestoned. in the distance, in the little dip/valley below, you can see the white marble tiles of the mosque which holds the kabaa, lit up by bright lights in the darkness. we park the car and begin walking towards it. even at night, the city is full of life, of people, but also of a sense of calm. there is no hurry here, not right now anyway, and the breeze is a little cooler, a little softer than it had been in jeddah. the mosque is a gilded golden marbled masterpiece - you walk in between two large doors with gold and woodwork, and first, there is the covered, carpeted area. the mosque's center is an open courtyard, and the surrounding parts of it are roofed in, with chandeliers and oriental rugs, white tile which is somehow always clean, despite the thousands of bare feet which walk it everyday. lining the marble walkway are coolers of zam zam, water which is legendary in it's own right from having sprung up as a life-saving miracle to hagar, as she ran between two hills in desperation, looking for water for her crying baby ismael during their exile in the desert.

you walk towards the center, because the kabaa has this pull, this center of gravity, it looks alive because of the swirl of bodies which circumnavigate its perimeter in perfect synchronization. and it's huge. the white tile that surrounds it is perfect contrast to the large black cube, and the air in the courtyard is even cooler somehow. the entire place holds a feeling of harmony, a sense of peace, and there is this camaraderie between all the different types of people sitting, thinking, praying. there are arabs, africans, south asians, europeans, americans, south americans. every ethnicity imaginable is represented here, the same, yet different, and if you just stand and watch the swirl of human bodies as they make their 7 circuits around the kabaa, you understand the true meaning of melting pot - it is a veritable whirlpool of color.

the night is long, spent in prayer, meditation. you drink zam zam to keep awake, splash your face with it occasionally. but my favorite part is the morning, the breaking dawn when, having completed all the requirements of ummrah, we head back to my uncle's car, drive back home. upon exit from the mosque, back out between those two large doors, you notice in the early light that there are white marble fountains out front, in the open air, and a constant flight of birds. i've never really found out what type of birds they are - pigeons i think, though some were white and may have been doves. they swirl in and out of the air in front of you, with sunrise as their backdrop, and there are old and young peddlers selling feed for the birds. we reach the car, drive out of the city with the mosque at our backs, and lining the rocky, sandy desert on the side of the road are hills, small mountains, where caves once provided a place to escape, to meditate. tufts of grass ever now and then. sleepiness and calm until you return to the hustle of jeddah once more.

i'll be the first to admit that i can't always concentrate when i pray - there are distractions naturally. the mind wanders to things needing to be done, things that happened during the day, things happening out behind you, which you can see from the corner of your eye. when i need to bring my concentration back, i close my eyes and conjure up those previous images in my mind, imagining white marble beneath my feet, cool desert air, palm trees, and swirls of humanity...

stolen words

2008-07-18T16:35:00.005-04:00

when you can' think of the right words yourself, look for quotes from others...

"we shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."
- t s eliot

2008-07-18T13:34:00.003-04:00

layers upon layer upon layers. truths resting on lies, resting on truths. one, two, three parts of a whole - like those little russian dolls. is each a part of one person, or are they three individual schizophrenic people inside one person? voices crowd the brain until one is no longer sure of oneself, but absolute silence is also a deadly impediment to progress - are we truly ourselves with those outside voices telling us who we are and what we should be, or are we truly ourselves in the silence, where our own lonely voice holds singular, oft-mistaken court? i'm not sure. but above all, there are simple truths which remain the same, constant over the years. like a love of reading. like a sense of identity. like a summer rainstorm.
i'm struggling to define myself again. i'm something like those layers of soil which indicate different periods of time the lower you go, an archaeologist's dream. but last night, i rode my bike in a summer downpour, and realized that experiences recur, and their recurrence is the same, yet different everytime. so life is a series of memories and experiences, many of which intersect with similar ones from a time before. the reason we don't recognize the repeat is that we've grown into different people, and each time, the experience is new, with a hint of deja vu.

when i was young and an only child, my mother used to take me to the swimming pool or the library in the summertime. afternoons would find us waiting for my father to come home from work, sitting on a grassy patch of green at the edge of the road, munching on doritos and soda. what infallible instinct led my mother to take her 7/8/9/10-year old daughter the library on rainy days, when she herself had always been an outdoorsy child?

the rain had timing. a few drops would start splattering the pavement in front of the library by the time we left, my thin arms carrying at least 7 or 8 books. we'd run to the car, and the ominous clouds which had been gathering all day would finally pour forth a deluge of torrential rain that would last anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours. clinging to my books in the front seat of the minivan, i would watch the clouds follow us home, and pretend that we could outrun them with the speed of our car. my mother, serene at the steering wheel, was the hero who saved us from the rain and the clouds.

as the dreamy teenager i grew up to be, head full of legends and myths from greek and celtic mythology, an active imagination fueled by years of reading mysteries and horror stories, the rains were welcome. i would stand barefoot beneath the lip over our front door, right next to the plant of jasmine flowers, and watch the sky sizzle with lightning. the breeze would waft the scent of hot rain and jasmine, making the two mingle, creating a link in my mind forever between jasmine flowers and summer rainstorms. my feet would be warm on the sidewalk, while pockets of steam rose from the spots in the parking lot where the rain hit hot pavement.

i have no memories of rainstorms in the summer during my two years at rutgers. perhaps that should tell me something about the selectiveness of forgetting. or about the connection between rain and happiness in my life.

during my only summer in heidelberg, in 2004, a friend and i were summoned to the courtyard behind the neue uni by friends who were waiting - it was the historiker sommerfest, and it was outside. trouble was, my friend i were stuck in the dining hall when the rainstorm began, and between us, had one umbrella (mine) and an inconvenient skirt-and-heels combination (hers). holding the umbrella above us both, we ran across the cobblestones, laughing, and when i said "screw it," and handed the umbrella to my friend to run across the courtyard bare-headed, she yelled that i was crazy and chased after me in the rain. we arrived in the courtyard, me soaking wet, and entered the small tents set up for the fest to the sound of our friends applauding.

there was the night towards the end of summer, when 5 of us sat on the terrace of that amazing apartment my Best Friend and i had just moved into, under the lip of an overhang, in our improvised pajamas. we ate pakoras with yogurt, watched the glittering city below, with the darkness inside the apartment at our backs, and let the rain fall before us in soft pitter-patters of sound, happy in the silence.

i remember those two nights better than entire years.

last night, the bike ride was an escape. it was raining, and the tires were slipping. the heat in nj is oppressive because of the thick humidity - it stifles you, drives you mad. i am not an expert bike rider - my youth was spent at the pool or the library, and my one experience with bike riding led to my little knees becoming so skinned after a fall on black tar pavement, that i never went back to my pink huffy bicycle again. but i suppose once you learn it, you never forget it (though stopping is still a problem). it rained heavy against my face, but the droplets were cooling, and i let the bike slide easily down slopes on our road. my hair curls oddly in the rain, as it did around my face, where it clung. and in that rain, i realized lots of things - that i am what i make of myself, and i never had need for strict definition. the rebellious, open-minded questioner of all things set in stone is still there, as well as the spiritual, faithful memorist, who knows certain truths will always be the backbone of her life. i realized also that although i may not be as happy as i was three years ago, right now, i am content...and that's enough for me.

let me count the ways...

2008-07-14T21:36:00.003-04:00

luis moreno-ocampo.....

how do i love thee?

well, for one, i want this man's job. badly. a few months ago, "Time Magazine" ran an article of moreno-ocampo, standing in his battling ground in a hague courtroom. the prosecutor for the international criminal court is my idea of a superhero.

my inner international politics nerd pines for him. this is almost as bad as my first lecture with professor klaus von beyme in heidelberg. i had read articles by him in my short political science independent study, and my heart palpitated wildly the day i first encountered him teaching. i had to stop myself from rushing after him after the lecture to get his autograph on my copy of one of his articles.

i was a little more bold with francis fukuyama a few years later. i'm pretty sure he's never had someone ask to get their picture taken with him before. oh well, there's always a first time...

and so you're back, from outer space...

2008-07-03T14:45:00.003-04:00

after a week or two of being lazy, allowing myself to fall into a "phase" (there are two phases in my brain, simplistically, which can be turned on and off at will by the surroundings they're in - the "writing phase", where words flow willingly from fingers adept with a pen or a keyboard, and the more dormant, hibernating "reader phase," where the brain turns itself off to all other aspects of life in order to become fully engrossed in a book or series...there is a rarer "tv/movie phase," in which said brain becomes engrossed in a tv series or a movie about to come out, but after the writer's strike, this one comes about only on the weekends, when i can surreptitiously download my favorite show, "doctor who"). for the past week or so, i've been in the reader phase, gleefully getting lost in a series of young adult novels recommended to me by a 23-year-old friend. i won't mention the name of the series (yet), as it's sure to warrant much throwing of tomatoes at the stage and laughter from the peanut gallery, but it's the type of guilty pleasure i would have really enjoyed in high school - in fact, it's exactly the type of book i would have read back then. but like the spice girls, my nancy drew mysteries, and the strangely short and choppy haircut i got in 9th grade, it's a guilty pleasure that will remain in secret until i can laugh about it later.

what got me blogging today? oh yes, this article in "vanity fair" - sometimes, i have to (grudgingly) like christopher hitchens...

laziness

2008-06-26T16:12:00.003-04:00

being 26 has made me lazy.

last week was my birthday, and i'm still trying to find a picture on the internet of the berlin street, "Strasse des 17.Junis," to adorn my blog with. because i don't think there are many birthdays out there that have their own street in a major city named after them.

but i can't find one. so i've asked a friend in berlin to take one and send it to me.

otherwise, i'm just going to work, coming home to play with my new pet macbook, and lazing around.

heidelberry finn?

2008-06-12T13:03:00.005-04:00

mark twain became beloved to me only after i realized that he too was an international traveler. and also after i realized his connection with heidelberg.

in one of those touristy bookshops on the hauptstrasse in heidelberg, there is a book by werner pieper called "mark twain's heidelberg." i bought it one day after lunch at the excellent chinese buffet at "dong dong" (yes, the name of that restaurant was the source of much mirth among friends while i was there, but you couldn't beat their buffet). it takes excerpts from twain's "a tramp abroad," a book in which his affection for the germans is apparent only when you look past his jokes and jibes. he was after all a humorist, and i wish we had focused more on that side of him when studying him in high school. "huckleberry finn" put me to sleep, though i haven't gone back and read it again since, and perhaps now, that opinion may change.
the interesting thing is that it's widely believed that heidelberg was the source of inspiration for "huckleberry finn." though based mostly on twain's experiences growing up and working in mississippi, there are definite signs of heidelberg's influence. when twain arrived in europe for that trip, he seemed to be going through a bout of writer's block. the retreat in heidelberg was supposed to provide inspiration, a change of scenery perhaps. the raft trip down the mississippi in the book seems to have been inspired by twain's trip by raft - down the neckar river in germany. he traveled from heidelberg to a town further up (or down) river with his trusty companion, "harris." and heidelberg, when translated into english, means "huckleberry mountain," which could be the source of the hero's name.

this is of course all conjecture. i'm probably getting my facts mixed up, and since my book is in a box somewhere (along with the complete "a tramp abroad"), i'll have to wait until it's unearthed before i can get my facts straight.

if you haven't yet, read twain's essay, "the awful german language," please read it. it's fantastically funny, especially for those who've been trying to learn the language. my favorite excerpt follows below:

"Gretchen.: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm.: She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen.: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm.: It has gone to the opera."

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print -- I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

damn computers

2008-06-12T12:45:00.001-04:00

i have a love-hate relationship with technology. and computers. mine for instance was down all of last week because it wouldn't connect to the internet. scheiss schlepptop.

oops, almost forgot...

2008-06-04T17:00:00.003-04:00

what funny german men used to do to their mustaches during the leinfeldener krautfest:

i kid you not, there was an entire stall where they did this to your mustaches. it's a schwaben thing apparently. the men in town would grow these 'staches for months, because at the end of the festivities, there would be a competition to see who had the most luxuriantly styled mustache. if you had a beard, you could make cool designs incorporating the two.
gotta love it.

on destiny

2008-06-04T16:33:00.006-04:00

destiny is a tricky thing - not all of us know exactly what it holds for us, but for some, the red arrows pointing in a certain direction are inescapable.

take the strange case of unity mitford, one of the 6 talented, lovely, and thoroughly mixed-up mitford sisters. according to the book "the sisters: the saga of the mitford family," unity mitford was conceived in swastika, canada, while her father mined for gold there in the early 1900's. looking for a name that would counteract the peacable moniker "unity," her grandfather gave her the middle name "valkyrie."
seems pretty obvious then why, though british, she became one of hitler's closest supporters, and attempted suicide when she heard that the nazis had been defeated.

i was thinking about the strange symbolism handed to us by the 2008 primaries, and the role destiny has played in it. strange that barack obama should clinch the democratic nomination, making history by becoming the first black candidate for the presidency, on the eve of the assassination of robert f. kennedy, who was such a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement when he ran in 1968...

traveling gourmand

2008-06-04T14:46:00.023-04:00

just read the ny times blog, "the frugal traveler." it's a great idea, and this is one of the many reasons i now wish i had discovered blogging while living in europe and not after - my stories now seem to be pure nostalgia and sentimental reminiscing, and i'm sure i'm forgetting things (what with old age and all...i turn a wise old 26 in 13 days Reader).
one thing matt gross's lovely pictures from farmstands in muret, france have brought back to me are the local festivals in germany, which seem to go year-round. most (but not all) revolve around food. everyone knows about oktoberfest, naturally (what they may not know is that oktoberfest actually begins in september), but there were other tiny ones, even in the smallest towns. leinfelden for instance had an annual "krautfest" (we experienced this at the very beginning of our stay, and my brothers put it most aptly when they said "why do the germans celebrate the cabbage?").
stuttgart had a week-long "hamburger fischmarkt," which yielded row upon row of stalls hawking fishy delicacies from germany and around the world.
benches and tables were set up in the middle of an empty ground, and the stalls were set up along the bordering periphery - you could literally go around to each one, get a sampling from a smiling, mustachioed vendor, and walk back to the middle, to the table and bench you were sitting at.

and the beginning of summer, as everyone in germany knows, is "spargel season," where asparagus bunches are sold everywhere, and all of those checkout-line magazines carry pictures and spargel recipes.
but though i may not celebrate christmas, the christmas markets (or "weihnachtsmaerkte") in each city really brighten up the darker winter months. professors and their students had a much closer relationship than their counterparts at larger universities in america - it's common practice for students to go out for drinks or dinner with their professors after evening classes. during these outings, the professors stepped away from their role as older, wiser mentors, and into a more convivial mood, but even they were able to pick out the students they wanted to be with (the genuinely intelligent and unassuming ones) from the ones who they'd rather avoid (the fawning, flattering, teacher's pets), and the relationship remained professional once back in the lecture halls (well, mostly).

the months leading up to christmas were the best - everyone felt spirited, and professors would end class early to take their students (10-15 at the most) down to the "weihnachtsmarkt" to treat them to crepes or "rinderwurst" and "gluehwein" (a mulled warm wine particular to christmases in germay - in my case, i always had the non-alcoholic version, known as "kinder punch," usually meant for kids).

alright, the thought of warm, fresh-made crepes with nutella and nut filling is making me hungry...stopping this post now to go seek sustenance...

in a new york minute...

2008-06-03T21:55:00.002-04:00

see, that last post was supposed to be about new york city. though i took the u.n. statistics and veered off seamlessly into a completely different direction (from cities and city life to cultural identity), i curbed my urge to veer wildly back to my original thought process, which would have consequentially destroyed the flow of thought. to many, the post would have been rendered incomprehensible.

aren’t you proud of me Reader?
though i agree with a button i read recently: “i’m not random – you’re just not smart enough to keep up with me.”

in dorothy parker’s short story “big blonde,” she deliciously describes the main character’s journey to newark, on the train from new york city. the main character it seems, had never been to new jersey, had never been outside new york even, because everything she had ever needed could be found in nyc (except for the suicidal sleeping pills she could only get in jersey without a prescription, the whole reason for her going).

this was 1920’s new york, and perhaps back then, it was perfectly feasible to never leave the city. but even today, i know of new yorkers who are like dorothy parker’s – perfectly self-sufficient in new york, and taking pride in the fact that they are true new yorkers through and through. even parker herself later apologized for the slight technicality of her birth – she was born in august, in her parents’ summer house in long branch, nj, and thus was not born a new yorker. but she insists that they rushed back right after labor day to achieve a certain new york authenticity for the newborn baby.

cities tend to be little islands in themselves – the best example being of course berlin during the cold war, a piece of west germany in west berlin, surrounded by eastern german territory.

but new york is unlike any other city in the world. i have fond memories of visiting my dad’s office when he worked in the city (he worked there for 10 years, for a computer company with an office in soho, just outside of where the lincoln tunnel spit you out from new jersey…i enjoyed that office, because at that age, i had no idea how grueling it was for my father to drive an hour and a half each way, and how exhausted he would be when he came home at 7 or 8 pm every night...i was even older when i realized it was a sacrifice for my sake, so that i could grow up going to school in a wonderful suburban neighborhood, playing hopscotch in our parking lot safely). i have even fonder memories of the world trade center buildings.

i won’t call them the “twin towers” or even “wtc” – those monikers have become repulsive to me (as words used in state-sponsored propaganda often become – for more on this, see germany, 1937-1945). the abbreviations we use for the world trade center buildings have become as difficult to swallow as the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.” even the day of their destruction, as i drove to school and listened to the radio, i was confused as to what the radio commentator meant when he called them “the south tower” and the “north tower.”

to me, they will always be the world trade center buildings, because that was what they were for – a piece of international territory in new york, with international citizens. we’d taken countless people from numerous foreign countries in and around the buildings over the years, all of our visiting friends and family members. i had a special ritual with the buildings, stemming to when i was a young girl – as we neared the buildings to park in the lot across the street, i would crane my neck back as far as it would go to try and see the tops of the two skyscrapers. i even did this as an 18-year-old, when we last visited in 2000.

did you ever go inside the buildings and take the elevator up to the viewing area? then you must remember the lobby, and how there was no security back then (as there is in the empire state buildings now). you simply entered into a lobby with faux green carpety/astroturfy stuff, and all around, hanging from the balcony above, were flags of the world. it was a special game to try and spot the pakistani flag in the mix, because it seemed that every time we were there, the flags had been switched to different positions.

that place to me was always where the world came together. tourists speaking a dozen different languages spoke in tones of awe at our accomplishment in this building, with its views of the city from the high glass windows. it was the heart of the city, and even though i still love the city today, the skyline has become normal and routine, and something seems to have been lost. in their obliteration, the buildings which once symbolized our connection to the world have become a symbol of its severance.

yet the essence of new york remains. the microcosmic culture, the artistic haunts in greenwich and soho, the amazement at finding a perfect little italian restaurant, hidden in the shadow of a more popular counterpart (where they don’t take reservations, and lines out the door mean if you wait, you won’t get dinner until 10 pm), where pretentiousness meets innovation, where people walk the sidewalks like superior beings, where fifth avenue chic meets boho hobos. it’s a city of contradictions.

on culture, part 286...

2008-06-02T22:10:00.006-04:00

a recent u.n. report found that half the world’s population lives in urban areas. the npr reporter working the story spoke from karachi,
pakistan, one of the fastest growing cities in recent times. the estimate is that 12 million people live in karachi today, though pakistanis say the number is close to 15-18 million souls. in the background of the reporter’s narrative were the familiar sounds of cars and motorcycles, rickshaws and honking horns.

i wonder if a person’s birthplace subconsciously influences a person’s psyche for the rest of their lives? even if no recollection exists, there must be buried memories somewhere.
i was born in karachi nearly 26 years ago, and have lived in the united states for the last 25 (omitting of course the 3 years i recently spent in europe). i wonder if that influences that complete balance of pakistani and american cultures. that hyphen between my identities is a tenuous thread, and at times, it seems i am neither this nor that (or, even more confusingly, both this AND that). hyphenated identities are a strange sort of schizophrenia – if mixed properly, they enrich while they deter, are maddening while being comforting. tip too much in either direction – towards one or the other – and you are half of a person. keep both halves simultaneously in your head, and risk going mad because of the two people in your mind. the singular individual is not an option.

it’s all about cultural nuance. certain cultural norms may be frustrating, but their worth is evident in their absence – lose them, and you both lobotomize and alienate yourself. you walk lopsided, you trip and fall and lose your sense of balance. odd as it may seem, culture provides balance.

take for instance the irritation i feel when dragged (kicking and screaming at times) to the whirling social obligations created by my parents’ friends. their essence is lost to anyone who’s not part of the pakistani community. you encounter all types of people, and i’ve been going to them for years – every weekend, you dress up in a shalwar kameez and heels, put on your make-up and your best face, and sail into a foray of love-hate relationships. children are thrown together at a young age, and some form life-long friendships, some form friendships that reveal themselves to have been fickle for years, while others retain mere acquaintances, and still others harbor animosity towards each other for events that happened long ago (a shoe, a window, falling glass, and a small, innocent child, who was once goaded into committing the ultimate childhood sin of telling) or grudges that their parents hold. put these people together and let them simmer over years and years. most children break away, some are made to attend everything for the sake of appearance, their failures and triumphs dragged across the dinner tables of other people’s houses.

i was told that i always needed to go because these get-togethers have lesson-potential. my mother tells me constantly that i’ll have to deal with all sorts of people in my life, and that these “davats” are prime learning ground. i’ve resisted this idea for years – and lately, some have become unbearable because no one my age, friend or foe, comes anymore. when they do, it’s mostly foes. the last few parties, i’ve been relegated to entertaining young children (a whole hoard, all under the age of 6) and helping with the washing up.

but it’s true, you do learn from it. it’s strengthened my relationship with my cousins and brothers (with whom i can now form a close knit circle of interesting and stimulating – and ok, sometimes silly – conversation/discussion). it’s created a tolerance in me for all types of people. i have patience i never knew i possessed, with some of the most irritating and bitchy people i’ve ever met. i’ve learned to keep up appearances. i’ve learned to feel defensive of my parents. i know how to be respectful, how not to argue with my elders, how not to raise my voice to my parents. i've learned more than i realize.

cultural nuance is a concept that some people don't get. at all. in the end, they limit themselves to either one camp or the other - the american, or the pakistani - and cut off forever that other half of the whole. but the intricacies of thought involved in pleasing everyone don't necessarily mean you lose yourself, that you put on a facade, that you are not self-respecting and strong, that you're not honest with yourself and others. sometimes, it takes a stronger person to bite back the urge to argue - sometimes, you're a stronger person for having put in that filter between your mouth and your brain.

pay-per-bagging

2008-05-30T14:04:00.005-04:00

(no duh)

the cultural baggage of countries now seems to include...er...bagging.

paper or plastic? - i'd never known it any other way. you went to shop rite, you bagged (or someone bagged for you) your groceries in either the yellow plastic shop rite bags or in the brown paper ones (or, if you're my mom, in both, wherein the paper bag goes into the plastic bag and voila! has spiffy, easy-to-carry handles).
my first year in germany, we lived in a suburb of stuttgart, a mere 20 minutes away. leinfelden was a small-ish town, with a town square that led off into the town u-bahn station. if you veered right after exiting our road instead of heading straight (in the direction of the square), you'd pass a row of small shops on either side of the main road. at the end, where the road curved and tapered off into farmland, there was a lidl, one of those small german grocery store chains that litter smaller towns (lidl and aldi were the smaller ones, real - pronounced ray-aal - was the larger model). to get to the lidl though, you first passed the bakery and the butcher shop, as well as a large walled area with a house attached to it (the wooden wall resembled the gates in "jurassic park," and when opened, revealed a large patch of vegetable garden). the walled area was the most interesting - it yielded fresh vegetables, which the owners then put in baskets outside the front of their house. the sign encouraged you to take what you like, and leave money in the basket by the door. it was a complete town honor system which everyone followed, and the dirt-encrusted radishes, dirt-encrusted potatoes, and dirt-encrusted romaine lettuce heads (with added tiny bugs) resulted in some of the most delicious salads i'd ever eaten.

but my first trip to the lidl was interesting, especially because i knew no german at the time (well, except for the basic "hello," "how are you?" and "where is the toilet?" phrases...none of which would have been of much help with the bored cashier). my mother and i walked in, bought a whole bunch of stuff and wheeled our shopping cart to the cash register. after ringing us up, the cashier asked us if we wanted to buy bags. we weren't sure what he was asking, until he said in broken english "ze small bag ist 50 euro cents, ze large one ist 1 euro." naturally, we said no - how preposterous! how laughable! we came from a land of abundance where bags were free and handed out to the masses! pay for our bags? surely you jest.

only, when he was done ringing us up, he proceeded to ring up the next customer, leaving us with an impossibly large pile of groceries, and without any bags.

the hilarity that ensued when we trudged home in the heat (this was mid-july) with armfuls of groceries is funny in retrospect, but dear God we hated it at the time. we thought these small German quirks were ludicrous - our neighbor telling us one day that we needed a compost, and that he had gone through our garbage and saw that we had separated our trash wrong; the street-side recycling stations with different slots for white glass, brown glass, and green glass; the ridiculously overpriced gas (quit complaining, the europeans have been over-paying for gas for ages); the horrendous customer service and stores that closed at 4 pm everyday (1 pm on saturdays, sundays closed completely)....

i don't know when we became accustomed to that style of living. it was a subtle and disingenuous process, and it hit us without our even knowing it. we gave in and bought linen bags the next time we were at lidl, and were also more careful of how much we bought. our fridge was tiny anyway, and could only hold so much, but food that had been bought only the day before seemed to taste fresher than food that's been lying in the fridge for a week, or in the freezer for weeks on end. in europe, the pace is slower, allowing for more people to buy groceries on a daily basis. in france, children seem to come with baguettes attached to their arms - they buy them from the bakery on the way home from school everyday. in england, there's the shop down the street where you can buy toast, but milk is still delivered fresh to the door by a milkman.

one halloween, my best friend and i were hosting a halloween party, and wanted traditional american candies to give to our friends. our neighbor worked as a civilian on the u.s. army base in heidelberg, and offered to take us to the american grocery store there. the base is a self-sufficient piece of quintessential americana, replete with kfc's and malls and high schools. stepping onto the base was like stepping out of germany and into a suburban american town. the introverted self-sufficiency was so complete, that once, while riding the #42 bus to class, i overheard an army wife, talking in english to her companion, telling her that though she had lived in heidelberg for 3 years, she had never explored the city, and had been afraid to even board a tram or a bus - and then proceeded to laugh and say she didn't need to anyway, seeing as they got all they could ever want on base (of course, this isn't representative - my friend eric, who also worked for the army, was constantly in town, and reveled in the different cultures he got to see while touring the world)

i still remember the surprise in my german friend's eyes when she saw that grocery store - pristine, bright shelves piled high with all kinds of packaged foods ("do they leave those lights on all night?" she asked, looking up), long checkout lanes, and most importantly, the baggers, efficiently bagging our groceries into plastic bags which we never paid for.

there's a thing called "expat syndrome" - the culture shocks of moving to a new country are great, and difficult to deal with, but when they subtly take over parts of your psyche and mesh with what you had been used to, coming back home is much more difficult. the adjustment is hard. if europe is all i talk about, it's not because i'm unjustifiably obsessed - i've settled back into american life quite comfortably, thanks very much. but i miss the air quality, the quality of foods, the effortless care given to families and environment, which are simply a part of european culture - they know no other way, because that's what they've always seen. similarly, if you've only lived in the united states and nowhere else, you know no other way but the one you've been used to for years. but expats seem to be an amalgam of bits and pieces they've taken from multiple cultures.

i went to shop rite the other day and saw linen bags for sale - and was pleased to see that lots of people actually bought and carried them to the store. it's annoying that ueber-celebrities have popularized the chic linen bags and the "go-green" mentality, and honestly, no change will be made unless plastic and paper bags and omitted from grocery stores completely (which ain't gonna happen) - but it's a nice step forward no?

i love mark twain

2008-05-30T12:31:00.003-04:00

i never used to. in high school, i thought "huckleberry finn" was the most boring book i had ever read. and "the adventures of tom sawyer" was 10 times worse.

but twain is also a humorist and a satirist, and i find myself drawn to those writers. his undercurrent of love for the europeans in his "tramp abroad" is also obvious to those who can sense it in his writing, and it always goes hand-in-hand with his fondness for the foibles of americans. any culture you experience has its ridiculousness, and that is fertile ground for the humorous mind. we love the deliciousness of it.

so here are some of my favorite quotes from twain...

"Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.

MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

MARK TWAIN, "How to Tell a Story"

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

MARK TWAIN, Autobiography

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

MARK TWAIN, Innocents Abroad

a little bit of heidel-lovin'

2008-05-29T16:06:00.004-04:00

because i'm nostalgic, and because it's just so goddamn gorgeous...
also:
the heidelberg webcam
for live pictures

on procrastination

2008-05-29T15:42:00.004-04:00

procrastination it seems is only a permitted indulgence to one class of careerist - the writer. i'm reading about mrs. parker's first few meetings with ernest hemingway, in which the already-established writer impresses her with the common knowledge among novelists that a single passage or a single page may be re-written 60 or 70 times before it finally sounded right. creativity also hardly strikes everyday, unless you are an innately talented individual with a recipe for avoiding writer's block. there are days when you wander around aimlessly, looking for the right wording or inspiration, or an idea of any sort.

today's a day when i can't write words. yesterday was fantastic - all day, i wrote vignettes in my head, waiting for the chance to post them to my blog. when i finally sat down at my computer at 11 last night, all vignettes promptly fled my brain, and i haven't been able to express anything properly all day. there aren't always opportunities to capture your own personal genius and bottle it. just rest assured that it exists, even if it's just in your head.

intellectualism

2008-05-29T13:41:00.003-04:00

during our formative years (which - if you maintain the idea that we are constantly learning, whether at 8 or 80 - lasts all our lives), we have a tendency to want to like things. the want is there, but the fulfillment of it may not be. for instance, i've always wanted to like jazz. i've always wanted to like flaubert's "a sentimental education." i've always wanted to like depressing new wave french films by truffaut. because even in the intellectual world, there is certain pressure to like things, as that will make you a truly intelligent intellectual.
but perhaps it's not the liking that's necessary, only the knowledge of it. i've tried to read "a sentimental education" 3 times already, and though i know the plot, the book never manages to capture my attention for more than 5 minutes. in school, though i loved literature and english class, i was never exposed to sartre or proust or mann or henry miller - and there's this sneaky guilty feeling that i should be. so i've been trying to read more of them, been buying books to add to my knowledge library, and i've found some of them to my liking. other books remain half-read, and i doubt that i will ever finish them.

maybe, when it comes to books especially, certain things appeal to us during a certain window of time in our lives when we can actually relate to them. maybe true intellectualism is learning what truly interests you, and weeding out the things that don't - all while maintaining that though they may be well-received must-read classics among the smarty-pants elite, they don't appeal to you at that moment in time. maybe you'll just have to go back to it later, and the thing will make more sense. and maybe, while you don't judge others, others should in turn not judge you.

i'm pleased to note however that i now like jazz. the jazz age has always been one of my favorite time periods, but i've never read about it in such depth as i have recently. the dorothy parker biography, book of short stories, and book of poetry has had a domino affect - also on my shelf, waiting to be read, are "a moveable feast" by hemmingway, and two books about the roaring twenties: one is about gerald and sara murphy, a glittering expat couple who were friends with nearly every literary and artistic american in europe at the time, and another about influential women in the flapper era. after listening to a recent live jazz band, and downloading some music, i now love it.

but (still) only certain types of it.

i think having a filter is good. i think not being a sheep, in any arena, is a positive form of self-discovery and independent thinking. i think we shouldn't be afraid to say that we didn't really care for steinbeck's "the pearl" or for the wonky music of the newest indie band, or for that intensely depressing new art house film. we shouldn't blindly follow just to please others.

i don't like being told what to like, and that thinking out of the box is influenced by many people in my life, but one in particular, who has been more and more in my thoughts recently. i realize that in a few days time, i will be as old as geoff witham was when he taught me in ap english my junior year. he was the teacher who made the most lasting impression on me, and he was 26 when he taught us. we were his last year before he went off to dc to pursue his graduate degree in creative writing. so geoff, this post's for you...

"blue is the color, football is the game..."

2008-05-22T17:38:00.005-04:00

yesterday's uefa champion's league final had all the drama, heartache, and joy we've come to love in the world of soccer - a fierce 1-1 tie, double overtime, penalty kicks, rain, sweat, blood, and tears. even if chelsea weren't my team, my heart would have gone out to john terry in the end - his obvious despair at the end of the game would only have left the staunchest man u fan unmoved.

i never was a huge fan of any sport until i experienced all that soccer could be while living in europe. there is such a pure love of the game there, this worldwide phenomenon which brings people together all over the globe (and, like everything that brings people together all over the globe, leaves this isolated little island of ours called america untouched). it takes me back to the first time i really experienced soccer, during the 2004 european cup in portugal.
i had no idea it was coming, and it was only when they started setting up a large screen in one corner of the grassy courtyard of our "mensa" (dining hall), that curiosity set in. i had watched a funny little thing called the "eurovision song contest" earlier that semester, also in the marstall mensa, and it was my first experience of those funny little cultural things that bring europe together, and the complex dynamics of even something so innocent as a song contest (for those of you who don't know what it is, the eurovision song contest is a contest of european nations - which for some reason includes israel and turkey - in which each country picks a song to represent it in the the contest. after that, representatives from each country take turns rating and giving their vote to songs from other countries. politics are abound, and you see the relationships between the countries come forth - as when germany and turkey both gave each other their highest marks, and israel gave germany its lowest marks, etc.).

the mensa was packed that night - it was the first girl's night at my apartment, and after a round of food and chatter, we picked up and walked to the mensa to see the contest. there was hardly any sitting room, and we all ended up piling onto the curved staircase and making fun of the whole thing (and afterwards, spent a memorable night walking around the town until 5 in the morning, when we watched the sun rise over the alte bruecke).

but if we thought it was packed then, the "europameisterschaft" was 10 times worse. the day of the first german match (germany vs. holland, i think), the grassy courtyard was overflowing with people and flags and funny hats. we could barely see the screen, and as we didn't have the advantage of sitting on someone's shoulders for a better view (as some people did), we went into the dining hall itself (which was empty) and sat up on the second floor, watching the action on the screen outside through the tall, floor to ceiling windows, eating our strawberries with nutella, and arguing over the match (christina and i, the americans, sided with germany, while flo, the german, sided with holland).

because heidelberg has the most international students in germany (it is the epitome of an international city, especially with the american army base nearby), there was always someone rooting for the other team. two matches on one day, i think it was portugal vs. england at one end, and italy vs. bulgaria at the other (or something - my memory fails me), all aiming for the quarter finals, were memorable not only for the penalty shot that beckham missed, but for the flag-draped portugese students who celebrated afterwards by dancing in the courtyard and singing nelly furtado's "forca."

now, 4 years on, the european cup is back again. matches start june 7th, and though i'll miss being physically in europe for it, the passion for soccer which germany instilled in me will just have to carry over here.

on tangents

2008-05-19T16:24:00.007-04:00

of course i realize that my posts go off into tangents, which usually seem unrelated to those people not fully familiar with the inner workings of my brain. i realize this because upon looking at anything i've written, there seem to be a profusion of dashes and parentheses. and because i've been told this by quite a few people.

but there is a method to this madness, and it stems from a number of reasons. i'll seek to be succinct in laying out these reasons, will lay them before you in an organized fashion befitting a research paper or a thesis. anecdotes will be relied upon however, and the Reader may be required to participate in a few mental calisthenics.
i speak in tangents because it seems inherent to my grafted life. i may not have moved as much as some people, but i defy anyone who has fully immersed himself in another completely foreign culture (whether it be during a vacation or an extended stay) to not feel somehow fragmented. as if every experience cleaved one into yet another person. you touch slightly, breathe it all in, then move on. i was born in pakistan, raised in the united states, lived in germany, and have traveled europe, asia, the middle east, and north and south america. in high school, the stakes were simpler - an identity falling somewhere in the taut balance between western thinking and eastern beliefs. but even the west has many hues (as illustrated by the differences and similarities between europe and america), as does the east, and i am the type of person who tries to always fully delve. this tends to drive one a little mad.

those of us who live this way live also more than a bit tangential to the world we live in and the people we know. we touch slightly and memorably, but can move on just as quickly or just as slowly, depending on how much the other has affected us. we are ethereal and boundless, a presence merely that resonates subtly.

i also tend to write purely from stream of conscious thought, without a filter. this is the type of training i'd been given in all my contact with creative writing. before leaving for germany in 2002, i celebrated my 20th birthday in june, and received from a cousin (also a writer, knowledgeable in writer's block, and a bit of a tangent himself) two gifts: a blank journal and a book on overcoming creative block. when experiences were new in stuttgart, and i needed to verbalize them, i turned to the book - i never finished it, but the first chapter always stuck with me. to unblock the writer, the author suggested mandatory "morning pages." these were three pages of pure stream of conscious thought, written first thing in the morning, from which the writer could unearth hidden ideas. it didn't matter what blather you wrote about, you just had to fill three pages.

and of course, there will be some people who understand the tangents, and some people who never will. growing up, i was usually in the honors-level classes, and the gifted-and-talented programs. this created a sort of sifting effect - there was a large group of us in 7th grade, which grew smaller and smaller, and finally dwindled to a group of about 30-40 of us. by senior year, we had become a strange sort of family - very different from each other, but close, prone to finding similarities in people we never dreamed of being similar to. all of us had elected to take the same ap classes in junior and senior year; some of us had even taken the same electives. those people are how i understand the difference between the creative and the rational - those who get the emotive style of writing that i tend to use, and those who don't. there is no lack of intelligence, it is merely a different way of thinking.

there was a group of us who were in both ap biology, and in ap literature, as well as the same few who had taken a creative writing elective. my friends and i, though we did well in it, could barely wrap our heads around the precision and formulaic methodology of the ap biology class - but there were others who loved it thoroughly. they liked that when we dissected a fetal pig or a frog, the organs were exactly where the textbook told us they would be. they liked being able to get concrete answers from formulas, the comfort of the objective. those same people were completely miffed however when we discussed e e cummings in lit class, or were asked to write a creative description in the writing class. cummings made no sense to them, while i and my friends delighted in the nose-thumbing rebelliousness of the poet and author who discarded punctuation and grammar to create something you could only understand by stepping back and feeling it - kind of like an impressionist painting on paper. come too close and scrutinize the dots too hard for coherence, and you lose sight of the flow and rhythm, which is telling you something you have to feel to hear.

sometimes, you have to hear with your eyes and smell with your tongue, listen with your nose and touch with your ears...

somewhere in the atlantic

2008-05-16T17:38:00.003-04:00

spoke to two of my very dear friends from heidelberg today after a long time. we bemoaned together (well, the three of us, in separate conversations with each other) how everyone seems to be moving away from heidelberg, and i suggested it may be best to meet somewhere in the middle of the atlantic.
i remember not being able to sleep on the plane, during one flight back to heidelberg from the u.s. it was april of 2004, semester break had just ended, and i was on my way home. the stewardesses had stopped harassing us with drinks carts and duty free and disgusting food, the lights in the cabin were off (save for the few individual reading lights above other insomniacs' seats) and i was watching people sleep. i didn't want to watch a movie, but i turned on my screen anyway, and there was that map animation that all planes have - an expanse of blue and green to represent water and land, a red line to show the plane's progress, and the plane itself. i remember being entranced by that tiny airplane, suspended for a time over the swath of blue, right smack dab in the middle of the atlantic. the expat syndrome had, i think, already started to form in my head - it's important to note that this trip back to the states had been my first time going back since i had moved to germany in the summer of 2002. everything was different. i remember feeling like a stranger in the town i had grown up in, because my eyes could not adjust to that level of american-ness again. things perhaps hadn't changed, but i most certainly had, and a feeling of imbalance pervaded my entire trip, the whole 2 months i was home.

in the airplane, at that point above the water in the middle of the atlantic, i felt at home. because i could see already the battle ahead, the dilemma of being in two or three places at the same time, not being able to move people i loved on one continent to the other, and vice versa.

when i came back to new jersey permanently, in 2005, i think everyone noticed the dissonance. it became harder to hide. people could see in my eyes that i was physically here, but mentally and emotionally not. it took 3 years to finally condition myself to being in america again, to taking part and living in the now. my english has finally come back to me (to the detriment of my german...though the deutsch geht noch, oder?), as there were moments when my normally articulate brain could no longer find the english words to express itself.

i think i've taken the best of both worlds again. it's still difficult to know that people i love are thousands of miles away - in heidelberg or berlin, munich or israel, south american, new zealand, australia, china. they're little pinpoints of light on my own personal map, and i follow their progress around the world with much greater zeal than they can imagine by my long silences and horrible communication skills. but they're there, in the back (and at times, the front) of my mind, and i realized today that my place is the same in their minds. we've carved out spaces for ourselves in each other's hearts, and i'm glad of it.

the vicious circle

2008-05-16T16:33:00.005-04:00

my brother tells me that when i become interested in something - be it a film, book, author, television show, whatever - i become something like a woman obsessed. he's 14, so he says it to tease (and i tell him he's wrong). but secretly, i've realized that he's very right.

since watching "mrs. parker and the vicious circle," dorothy parker has become my newest point of interest, and i will read anything i can get my hands on to know more about her, and about the algonquin round table (also known as "the vicious circle").

of course, this all stems back to my interest in anything pertaining to the 1920's - the "lost generation," the meetings in paris of minds like f. scott fitzgerald and earnest hemingway, the flapper generation, the jazz age, sylvia beach's iconic "shakespeare and company," the emptiness and hedonism of a generation between wars, books by evelyn waugh. all of that however lay in the realm of expat life, which was rampant in the 1920's. dorothy parker however has brought me home.

watching two movies about the '20's back to back ("bright young things" and "mrs. parker..."), along with my recent book purchases ("the beautiful and the damned," "a moveable feast," and the diaries of anais nin) have probably fueled the obsession. or as i like to think of it, stoked the fires of my curiosity.

the algonquin round table began as a joke. in 1919, one member invited another to lunch at the algonquin hotel, supposedly to celebrate the latter's return from europe. in fact, the former took the opportunity to thoroughly roast the latter, and the joke was enjoyed so much that lunch at the algonquin became a daily ritual for this collection of literary humorists, satirists, wits, and critics.

they met there for lunch (and outside of lunch) from 1919 til 1929. the "ten-year lunch" resulted in countless collaborations, friendships, and affairs (both real and imagined) between the circle. from this group arose the cultural icon that is "the new yorker."

like any friendship, it had its tensions, its jealousies and critics. after 1929, when the group disbanded because of projects that took them outside the scope of new york city, many found they no longer had anything to say to one another. they became dissatisfied, and dorothy parker herself derided the group as just a bunch of jokesters looking for a forum for their wit.

but something about the idea appeals to me nonetheless.

why mrs. parker...

2008-05-15T15:53:00.004-04:00

i finally finished watching "mrs. parker and the vicious circle," which i loved. the movie was a bit too long, but the scenes in which dorothy parker recites bits of her biting poetry to perfectly match a certain situation in her life, as well as the buzz of the 1920's literary circle and that unsatisfied, ever-present love between dorothy and mr. benchley, made it worthwhile. it made me go back and read some of my poetry books as i haven't read them before.

of course, my taste in poetry still veers towards the sarcastic and sharp-witted - the "up-yours" poetry that is e e cummings is my favorite, and has been for awhile, but after looking up and reading some of dorothy parker's verse, that may change. one of my favorites is a poem entitled "experience":

"Some men break your heart in two
Some men fawn and flatter
Some men never look at you;
And that cleans up the matter."

snow!

2008-01-17T23:32:00.000-05:00

snow today! big fat flakes of it, which somehow made me insanely happy, even when they got into my eyelashes and down the back of my neck while i cleaned my car off at 6:30 tonight in heels and work clothes (my business pants are drenched and hanging on the chair in front of me as i write). it blanketed thickly and quickly.

on the way home, it turned into rain...

it reminded me of the time it snowed, and goobs and i (me in my glasses and both of us in our household sweats) walked down to the Schlossgarten and made snow angels, and had a massive snowball fight. i think we scared the nice couples who were there to watch the snow fall onto the brightly-lit jewel of a city below.

before that, in the fall, we had stood together at the railing above the aqueducts, contemplating the beginning of a semester. the trees above us were golden, but somehow, the trees next to us were not. we realized the the spotlighting from below made the leaves glow with in a gold light, and it reminded me of that old fairy tale, about the 8 dancing princesses and their dancing slippers - the one where the 8 sisters find a city beneath the floorboards, and they pass trees with silver leaves and trees with golden leaves, cross the river to meet the 8 princes they dance with every night til dawn.

snow makes me fanciful.

bananas and europeans and the mona lisa

2008-01-16T22:46:00.001-05:00

well, that sums up this post rather well, don't you agree?

i realize that once again, i'm slacking off in the blogging department. i actually write a lot, it's just that i have limited internet access at work, which means that all the stuff i type up gets saved in ms word and then sent to my webmail so that i can access it at home....

and i'm lazy as hell.

i realized this today while looking at old e-mails. i've kept every single e-mail from my heidelberg days - all the ones from 2003 through today. gotta love the larger inboxes. not that there were a lot of e-mails from when i was actually physically there; europeans are still creatures who like personal interaction better than interaction via the middleman. it used to be so easy to meet up for coffee or lunch spontaneously, to catch up with friends and get work done all in the course of the same day. my relationship with certain friends is written out in long communications, while with other friends, the true depth of our relationship can hardly be seen in our rare and infrequent missives.

i'm so bad at keeping in touch. there are so many people i've lost touch with over the last 2-odd years (i still can't bring myself to believe it will be almost 3 years in march), and i'm not quite sure how to reconnect. maybe once i see them again in person, it will remind us gently of the times we had. incidentally (purely out of curiosity), i see that a round-trip ticket from philly to stuttgart in oh, say, mid-february, costs only 400 bucks - a lot cheaper than i had imagined it to be...hmmmm...

in other news, i was very proud of my old alma mater today - manuscript specialists at the university of heidelberg have discovered the true identity of the mona lisa! i've never been prouder of old ruprecht karls. though apparently, they discovered this back in 2005, and no one knew until a german radio station made it public. modest to a fault, my heidelbergers!

so my personal statement for law school is about bananas. which reminds me, i should finish that first, then come back to this topic, at length, later.

2007-06-24T23:03:00.001-04:00

apparently, the attention spans of people who read blogs and comments is very short. i have been told this before, that my postings are way too long, and i was told again tonight by my Cousin, who i asked for suggestions.

"hey Cousin, how's my blog?"

*Cousin makes face* "it's good, but it's a bit...uhhh..."

"what?'

"uhhhhhh..."

"?"

"long. your posts are a bit long. you go through lots of tangents."

*sigh. yes, i am the long-rambling, tangent queen. a lover of parentheses and dashes, to illustrate tangential points. i have to cut back...

but i still refuse to use the shift key dear Cousin...

childhood and perceptions

2007-06-23T14:40:00.002-04:00

this is ridiculous. i realize that this blogging thing is both preciously precocious and abominably inadequate. the screen in front of me is flat, cannot possibly encompass the 3-dimensionality of character. you will see me as a product of my words - my opinions will define me, and with that power, i must be incredibly careful. if i say the wrong thing, express the wrong opinion, you will judge me as humans will, make assumptions and create perceptions that may or may not be true. or perhaps, they may be negative and truer than even i can comprehend - because we are the blind spots to ourselves. we are the points of reference that cannot be seen by our own eyes, and perhaps what we perceive to be our real selves are not our selves at all...

i had always prided myself on being open-minded. i was 11 when i went to pakistan for the first time, and in high school, i had the opportunity to visit places far and exotic over summer and winter vacations - paris, switzerland, london, saudi arabia. i was one of those kids in high school who took her foreign language class (in this case, french) seriously, stuck with it for all 4 years and finished off with ap french in 12th grade. i knew that there was a world beyond the 20 mile radius of new jersey where i had grown up and spent my entire life.

yesterday, i drove my brothers to a friend's birthday party, following an old country highway which i haven't been on in ages. country road 601 runs through the back end of town, a strip of road with trees and farms on either side, a small homemade and family-run roadside farmer's market where we used to buy corn to barbecue in the summertimes when i was younger, used to run barefoot through our townhouse development, ran tumbling across grass to catch the ice cream truck. it was an ideal childhood, and this road is one of the last remnants of the town which reminds me of those days. in the last 5 years, hillsborough has expanded at an alarming rate. the schools are crowded and packed, a trend that was just starting as i graduated high school, and whereas i remember being one of a handful of "brown" kids in my high school (one of only three south asian children in elementary school), there are now indian and pakistani families seemingly everywhere. they grocery shop at the local shop rite in their saris and shalwar kameezes, make their way over to blockbuster in their chappals, converse in urdu and hindi at the local pizza place. and it seems that the more diverse hillsborough has become, the more xenophobic and unwelcoming a place it seems to be.

but on 601, i am a child again, driving with the windows down at sunset, singing along to songs i listened to as a teenager. "the freshman" by the verve reminds me of the summer after my freshman year, when i watched seniors in my neighborhood get dressed up and go off in limos to their prom, the day a perfect 70 degrees, even the sky cooperating in creating that magical atmosphere, and this song playing on the radio in my room as i sat by the open window and daydreamed. dave matthews singing "where are you going" and "ants marching," greenday's "when i come around," aqua's "barbie girl" - all recorded onto cassette tapes from the radio (didn't we all do that? before mp3 players and ipods and downloads, there were the mix tapes, the songs we dashed across our rooms to record onto the blank tape waiting in our cassette players, leaping and bounding over chairs and other teenage-room-debris). this road reminds me time and again of how much i loved my childhood, loved growing up here, the way i grew up here, firmly ensconed between two worlds and two identitites - the pakistani, which meant speaking urdu with my parents, wearing shalwar kameezes to get-togethers on the weekends, wearing new clothes and missing school on eid, and the american, which required school spirit at football games, halloweens spent traipsing over fallen autumn leaves, pumpkin-carving, school plays, the school newspaper, and summers running into classmates at frank's pizza and dollar video (remember dollar video? where we could rent videos for a buck and catch up on summer goings-on, before the more expensive blockbuster came along and put them out of business) and the fireman's fair.

do you know that there's no way to hyphenate an identity in germany? for that matter, in most of europe. you have to say it in a roundabout way. in germany, you may live as a german, but you are always quizically asked where you're from "originally" (urspruenglich) if your looks or your accent don't match. it is mostly asked without malice or prejudice, only frank curiosity, but there's no way of saying you are a "pakistani-american" or a "muslim-american" or an "irish-american." you are "american-originally from ireland." even in europe itself, as an immigrant, you spend years living it down. you are "french, of moroccan descent."

in our house in leinfelden, just outside of stuttgart where we lived for a year and a half, we once called a handyman to repair something in our basement - a leak or faulty plumbing, something along those lines. our repairman spoke little english or german, but we were able to converse, talk about his background. i remember he sighed and shook his head, so old and tired, and he told us with a certain weariness in his eyes of how he had come to germany from italy 40 years ago - but that in the eyes of everyone, he was still, and always would be "italian." he had yet to receive german citizenship, and people still asked him where he was originally from, fitting him, figuring him in. now his sons distance themselves from anything italian, try to make themselves as german as they can.

this is not, in any sense, meant to be a negative critique of just germany. this feeling about immigrants is rampant in all of europe, especially in france. and in most of my posts, i will tend to praise things i've seen in germany much more than the contrasting aspects of the u.s. - but that's because we always criticize the ones we love, the ones we know best and are closest too. something about the grass being greener on the other side...
but perceptions - that was what this blog was supposed to be about. traveling, more than anything else, opens your eyes to how wrong you were about things before. it humbles you, makes you realize that you can never know anything, that it is futile to try to know it all - but not futile to learn as much as you can. stories about the holocaust and german atrocities from world war I and II had been drilled into my brain from 4th grade onward, so when we first moved to germany, i was intensely wary. but it's when your expectations are at their lowest that they are most often exceeded (this coming from someone neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but simply a magical realist). in subtle ways, the original culture shocks became ingrained in our lives. the irritation we felt at stores being closed by 4 (at the latest 6) pm, and completely on sunday, was replaced by the feeling of having time to relax, time to spend together, outside or in, as a family. walking became welcome, with bakeries and grocery stores and hairdressers all within walking distance, even biting winter air or beating summer sun was no longer a nuisance. we felt healthier, happier, more relaxed. i felt like i had never seen autumn leave of that hue before, felt that sort of wind, a different sort of air. everything was new, and cautiously embraced, and before i knew it, by the time i left heidelberg three years later, i was in love with the new things i had encountered in germany.
so now, my identity is split, will probably split further with more travel. i am an adaptable chameleon, at home in europe, pakistan, south america. i've tried to understand the pakistani mentality, the american one, played devil's advocate in europe and in the countries encompassing europe, extolled and derided the same aspects in all three. i've felt welcomed in venice and milan and buenos aires and the bahamas, been made aware of the color of my skin in parts of ireland and france and switzerland and england, had spiritual awakenings in part of saudi arabia and pakistan and new york city and canada, and placed myself in other people's differently-styled shoes around the world. this is where i'm coming from when i write here. i am the product of all the places i have seen, and of the ones i have yet to see...one thing traveling taught me is how very wrong perceptions and prejudices can be. naturally, we are (mostly) raised to believe that being prejudiced about anything is wrong, that all are created equal, but even then, our parents and our teachers, our classmates have negative opinions that (through some kind of mental osmosis) are transferred subtly onto us.

to the first born go the brains

2007-06-22T06:02:00.000-04:00

ha! i knew it! this is why i always tell my younger brothers how much smarter i am than them:

http://health.msn.com/healthnews/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100165115&GT1=10109

cue the intro music

2007-06-22T05:29:00.003-04:00

i find introductions awkward (*shuffling of feet back and forth). as much as blogs are a form of self-centered ego ("look at me! i'm special/different/new/alive!"), i'm not entirely sure i like writing about myself. which is why i end up using the technique of writing about myself in third person, like some schizophrenic talking to all her selves at once. or maybe just like someone with a bluetooth thingy stuck in her ear - now people walk around everywhere seemingly talking to themselves, and as soon as you begin to believe they may be slightly mad, they turn and there it is, gleaming, like some symbiotic, mutually beneficial parasite, a barnacle, and leech. we are indeed slowly becoming obsessed with the self.

my name is zainab, and please, refrain from the usual jokes about zucchini and zebras and xylophones (that last one starts with an 'x' you idiots). i was born in...well no wait, i'll save that for last. if i put it in the beginning of the story, people automatically begin to make judgements, though they've probably already begun their judging by my name. i've lived in this same town in central new jersey (usa) my entire life, ever since my family moved here when i was a year old, and except for the three years i spent in germany, studying and traveling about europe like there was no tomorrow. and ok, i was born in pakistan. i'm a muslim american, and THAT is why i see things differently. that, and the fact that i spent some time in europe, spend even more time (as much as i can afford) wandering the world.

this blog is a compilation of thoughts on places i've traveled to. i figured it was about time i put them down, beore i begin forgetting lucid details and such. also, since i did get my bachelor's degree in political science and history from ruprecht-karls-universitaet heidelberg, germany's oldest and most prestigious university nestled in the hills of heidelberg, i tend to rant. i read lots of newspapers (the new york times, le monde, die welt, die zeit, the guardian, the times of london), speak 4 languages, and almost always have something to say about something. this is where the world comes together, becomes cognizant and whole and tangible for those without the time to travel or read a dozen newspapers a day.

i had a french teacher in high school, whose words stuck with me much longer than i had expected. her big thing was to immerse us in the french culture, not just the language, to show us that there was another way of life that had potential to be better than ours. she talked about how isolated we are in america, how closed in, the island mentality, the "me-against-the-world" ideaology. and she animatedly urged us to open our eyes, see things a little differently, actually live and take part in the world around us. so madame williams, this one's for you...um, i should probably do the banal and expected ("do it so we can get on with it damnit!") and introduce myself.