words, words, and more words

I feel like I'm on day two of my weekend already, because day one was punctuated by a long and luxurious three hour nap. Hm, nap. I actually deliberately got out of bed at a reasonable hour with the promise to myself of a long nap later, after a Very Exciting Civic Event that was taking place right in front of my apartment building. Unfortunately, I ate a frosted and sprinkled donut and a frosted and sprinkled cookie in affiliation with the Very Exciting Civic Event and the fact that my stomach is no longer 15 years old revealed itself in a rather unpleasant overstuffed feeling. So then I HAD to take that nap.

Now I am leaving for the beach. Beach! Beach! Too bad it's cold still and the beach will be more of a test of one's will to live in the freezing than an enjoyable beach-like experience. Still, I'm escaping normal life and getting to see some more of Gone West, so I am excited. It's so nice to have a real weekend. Many lawyers do not, and I suspect that when I get a real live permanent job that pays real live permanent money, I will not either. I shall relish them now.

hateful day

am hating of this day. cannot make complete sentences. or use pronouns. just stumbled through door, put on comfy clothes retrieved from floor in entryway, and sat on floor for a while before could find energy to get bonbons to restore self.

this day has been like that screensaver everyone used to have on their computers (i have rediscovered pronouns) in which a seemingly endless stream of asteroids comes flying toward the viewer.

...

now time has passed.

bullet point number one: call from ci.ti.b@nk at 7:00 a.m. that went approximately like this:

person: you are $456 behind in payments.
me: that's nice. i can't pay it.
person: you are out of forbearances.
me: that's nice. i can't pay it.
me: i have to go to work now. [hangs up]

bullet point number two: we are involved in this huge, um, project at work, and all of us involved are getting cran to the key. (that's cranky, if you couldn't tell.) at least two of the four people involved are the sweetest people humanity has ever known, but even they are getting cranky. (i am NOT included in the sweetest people, because while i think i am fairly nice, sweet is not a word i feel applies to me. i like sweet people, but i am not one of them. but i am fairly good at hiding the cranky. i get happier the more things go wrong.) and the project drags on and on, through the fault of outside forces.

bullet point number three: someone asked me to LIE for him/her today. am a lawyer! took an oath not to lie! or even mislead! plus i have a (HUGE) problem with it, and if you knew my job, you would know that lying is not a good thing to make a part of it. plus, hi! lying! so i flatly refused and then said person said desperately, "but what should i do, then?" er... let's see... TELL THE TRUTH.

seriously. this is my life.

had to invite a friend over so as to alleviate utter despair about humanity. fortunately she came with, eh-hem, beverages. law school failed, but gone west might just turn me into an alkie. if i weren't so broke. and tired all the time.

i think i need to get into wine. it is good for you, according to the nytimes. also relaxing. and you don't have to feel funny about drinking it on a work night. which, let's admit, vanilla vodka, coffee liqueur, and jaager shots on a work night? that's sketch. i am sketch, right now.

this is what we call blogging under the influence. sorry, y'all. am now off to a bath and early bed.

girly moment

Why yes, it is June. One might be fooled by the chill in the air and the fact that I'm wearing my winter coat to work, but June it is. I wore a sweater to work today.

Is it bad that my real goal in finding a real live permanent job that pays real live permanent money is not to practice law but so I can buy clothes? One can only make so many combinations of two suit jackets and one jacket-like sweater. Fortunately jobbing does not require a suit every day this week, because when it does I am forced to pretend that NO ONE NOTICES that I'm wearing the same two jackets every day. Will I wear the gray jacket three times this week or the black? Life is so very exciting. Especially when the alternative is to wear it TWICE this week.

I had another jacket, of the expensive pre-law school J.Crew variety, but it has outgrown me. Or I have outshrunk it. Or something. I weigh less now than I did then. Also, as my roomie M. liked to tell me in law school when I complained about the largeness of pre-law school clothes, "You just dress like more of a slut now." I prefer to think of it has having discovered how to buy clothes that fit. And in my defense, suit jackets have gotten shorter and more fitted. Anyway, this old one is a very nice wool jacket, but I look in it as if I'm a ten year old trying on my dad's suit and carrying his briefcase.

(Random side story: I was actually really excited about briefcases when I was about ten. I got one as a birthday present and I used to carry it to school, just like my dad carried his to work. Then there was a war and stuff and we left it behind to come to the US. And then kids in the US carried backpacks on one shoulder and I had to work on being cool, so the briefcase was a non-starter. The last thing I needed was yet another *NERD*DORK*CULTURALLY INEPT AFRICA GIRL* sign on my forehead. I had several already.)

Anyway, when I get a real live job, I'm going to buy new suits. Maybe even some that are not on the $59.99 sale rack at Macy's. Maybe even some that, gasp, FIT. Maybe even a TALL, so the jacket has sleeves that come all the way down to my wrists.

It's going to be brilliant.

(In case, you were wondering, this was, in fact, an entire post about clothes. I'm SUCH a girl today.)

P.S. Speaking of clothes, and clothes that fit, has anyone bought trousers at the G@P lately? What is up with 1. the STRETCHING, so that the trousers that fit you when you buy them are heinously large a day later and 2. the size enlargement, or whatever you call it, that require me to buy clothes that are labeled two sizes smaller - sometimes three - than anywhere else? And what do people who are actually small in stature do? Are they making 00s there now? I love their trousers, and the fact that they come in X-Long (love! love!) but I want to beg them to just let me go back to my regularly scheduled clothing size.

begin story.

I burned my ESOPHAGUS. I overheated my leftover Thai food and then was rushing and I stuffed a big bite into my mouth and it was too hot to chew, so I swallowed. I could feel it burning all the way down and I could feel it burning in my stomach. As a piece of advice: if the food is too hot in your mouth, spit it out. It will hurt even more on the way down. Then I hacked horrifically, causing general alarm. My esophagus still hurts. It feels like heartburn.

End of story.

not this site's normal topic

I was trying to explain, one day, how I feel cheated by the story that modern America - and every adult around me - told me growing up. It was the basic story: boy meets girl, boy asks girl out, boy and girl get married.

It wasn't until this year that I realized the crucial missing pieces. First of all, how do things get from meeting to asking out? And second, how do things get from asking out to marrying? The myth skips over them. I don't even know those pieces in my parents' story.

"So what will you tell your kids some day when you have them?" my friend asked.

I said, "I will tell them that some people find someone to love and some people don't. I will tell them that things will be okay and they can be happy, either way."

Then I thought for a while and I added, "I will also tell them that it's worth loving people. Sometimes you love someone more than they love you. Sometimes the other person loves you more than you love them, and you can't force yourself to love them more. The only thing you can do is be honest and gentle with them. And maybe they won't be honest and gentle with you, so you have to be honest and gentle with yourself. And sometimes that requires the eating of lots of bonbons."

two bits

It's been eleven years since I graduated from high school and seven since I graduated from college. I've made lives for myself, long-term or short-term, in seven cities in five countries on two continents. I have an official card to show that I'm a full-fledged attorney, allowed into courthouses and prisons. And I sometimes still find myself thinking, as life happens, "Don't they know I'm not grown up enough for this?"

...

I love the location of my building. I love that I can walk to everything. I love that my commute is ten minutes on any of two buses or two trains. I love that there is an exercise room. I love that the building smells good. I love the courtyard in the middle. What I don't love? THE IDIOT WHO KEEPS PULLING THE FIRE ALARM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. People, this is not a frat house. And pulling the fire alarm? By the fifth time, at five a.m., it's no longer funny. I just want to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Mario

Do you remember Super Mario Bros 3 on Super Nintendo? I loved Super Mario Bros 3. It seems like the soundtrack of the early 90s, that doot-doot-doot-doo when Mario falls into the abyss. Frankly, I would like my life to be like that, just doot-doot-doot-doos when something goes wrong and then eternally popping right back up on the world selection screen, bouncing with excitement at whatever is to come next.

K. pulled out her old Super Nintendo from a box in the garage at 1 a.m. last night and we sat on the living room floor playing it. It came back to me - the jumping, the spinning, the fire power. Except that I'm disastrously bad at it after ten years and some rather strong spiking of the iced chai I was drinking. I fell into the crevices, ran into the ducks, and landed right on the boomerangs that the football player throws. And I've totally forgotten how to fly. But it was fun, in the dark, with the plinky music and the two-dimensional backdrop.

I'm inspired now. I want a Super Nintendo! Perhaps I shall track one down, when I get some money, when I get a real job, when I won't have time to play.

iced coffee in the sun

The weather people predicted thunderstorms yesterday, but the sunshine and 75 degrees persisted until evening. I went to the library, again, and got the nine books that I had put on hold. They filled my backpack to overflowing and I staggered under their weight. I sat outside with the first of books at a coffee shop, drinking an iced toddy, as they call them here, cold brewed coffee with hazelnut syrup. I had asked hopefully at the counter about hazelnut cold brewed coffee, but that exists apparently only in New York. People are snobs about coffee out here, and they don't like them pre-flavored. The sun shone and the train clattered past me.

In the evening, I took the train out to S.'s place to watch a movie. The sun was heading toward setting while the sky filled with clouds coming, oddly, from the east. The light was nearly gone down where I walked, but it lit the tops of the ancient tall pines. Thunder finally rolled across the sky, and a few drops of rain landed in the very same place on my forehead.

warning: hypochondria ahead

A long holiday weekend, but when someone asked me yesterday if I was looking forward to it, I said no. "I don't get paid for holidays, and I have a limited number of friends in this town because I've only been here for a few months, and too many of them are going out of town. I'd rather work." It's true but it's not. By the end of a week, I'm exhausted and worn down. My sore throat builds as the week goes on, and by Friday I'm googling "too many bruises" because I seldom bruise, but I HAVE A BRUISE ON MY HAND LEUKEMIA DYING HYPOCHONDRIA. One. Single. Bruise. The only one anywhere on my body (yes, I checked). In addition to not bruising easily, I am clumsy and I have a high pain threshold, so I run into things a lot. Mostly I don't remember them unless I get a bruise, like this triangular bruise on my hand, which is already almost gone, and then maybe if I think back carefully I remember how I slid into my desk too quickly and caught the corner of the drawer, or slammed the door on myself while trying to slip in with too many things in my hands.

Regardless, I stocked up on Emergen-C and pro-biotic yogurt drinks and have committed to drinking one of each per day because I have concluded that this daily working gig is wearing down my immunity, what with all the not getting to bed on time and dealing with the general public and forgetting to wash my hands because by the time I get a break I'm just too hungry to wait to snarf down those almonds that have to keep me going for three more hours. I can't do that instant hand sanitizer stuff, either, because I don't believe in it. Many a time I wish I did believe in it, particularly on long drives to remote places in Rwanda or Sudan (other option: careful eating of granola bar without removing it from package or touching it with hands). But I disapprove of all that antibacterial, alcohol-based stuff because I think it's killing us as surely as it is the poor innocent bacteria, so I can't be one of those people who keeps it on their desk, not even the smelly yummy kind.

Last week, I found myself comforting a guy who was nervous and sweating about his drug charge by saying, "Some people who come in here have really BIG problems." And the weird thing was that he was comforted, and said, "Yeah, you're right. At least I don't have big problems."

October 31, 2002

One of the things about law is that you are almost always dealing with dates that are over. We all know, of course, that different days mean very different things to each person. Someone had a baby today, we say, and someone lost the person he loved most, on this day when I went to work and sat there doing work things workishly all the working day. In law, though, every date means something. Every day I hear dates. Many of the dates mean little to me, except that I think about how I was in law school at the time, or was just a child. Today, someone mentioned October 31, 2002, and I realized that is the date I arrived in Rwanda for the first time. I waited my first five hour layover in Nairobi - I remember sleeping sitting up with my head on a table in the transit lounge, drooling because I was sleeping so deeply after two sleepless nights on airplanes. I flew for the first time over Lake Victoria and above those green hills of Rwanda. I heard the woman behind me explain to her seatmate that you know you are flying over Rwanda when the houses are built in rows along the road and covered with shiny new metal sheets, because those are the post-genocide reconstruction projects. I remember thinking that first time I landed at Kanombe Airport about the plane that was shot down in 1994 and wondering what it would be like for our plane to take missiles at the end of the runway. We drove through Kigali's streets, and though my bleary exhaustion I thought them far neater and more precise, if a bit dusty, than any African capital I'd seen.

Someone addressed a letter that day, on October 31, 2002, and someone sat in a boring meeting. Someone learned the truth, and someone never woke up after their afternoon nap. Someone fell in love, and I, I met a new home, and no one around me today knew that, that date or that meaning. No one but me, sitting at work, working and remembering.

on the train

I'm on the train, in a corner seat next to the door, next to a man with an art portfolio and a rolled up tube of big papers. I'm looking out the window across the way, enjoying the view from what a friend of mine says is "the slowest joke of a train system in the world," but I love it, the way it trundles along among downtown buildings, stopping at stoplights and running alongside the cars on narrow brick streets like an awkward, oversized bus.

The man asks me about my bag, and I tell him I got it in Rwanda, but I don't encourage him, certainly not enough for the monologue he starts in a faded English accent about merengue, which he seems to think has something to do with Africa, and then about Indian drumming and how he drummed for four Be@tles songs and gardened for Jo.hn Lenn0n and Yok0 0n0 and am I an artist? "No," I said, "an attorney," thinking that if anything should quash the artist connection it would be something as prosaic as law, but it does not, because he finds another connection and he tells me that his daughter is studying law, and that if you give yourself over to God, pure love will find you. "I follow a small Indian religion," he said, "but at heart I'm a Christian and always have been."

I haven't gotten a word in edgewise, or sideways, or any ways for five minutes and I'm watching the stops and wishing that my stop was this one instead of the next one. "You become what you associate with," he tells me, "so if you associate with Harley riders, you will end up wanting to wear black leather, or play an instrument if you associate with musicians. The secret is just to give yourself over to God, and he will give you pure love. It's that simple. We used to know the truth about God, but we've lost it. You can see it in the ancient writings, but we don't understand them anymore."

I haven't looked in his direction since the question about the bag, but now he's apologizing for his beer breath, from drinking beer with his pizza at the street fair, he says, and I don't mention that I know the difference between beer breath and hard alcohol breath, and his is the latter.

"You have a nice aura," he says. "You search for the truth, don't you?"

"This is my stop." I say in return, standing up. "It was nice talking to you."

I ignore him when I hear him say, as I stand up to go to the door, "You are gorgeous," and instead I walk straight ahead, out the door, up the shaded street, and into the quiet of the library.

spring-a-ling-ling

It's warm enough in my apartment to lull me into inertia. I can't quite get out the door, even into the sunshine and beauty, even though I reserved about 15 books on the library website and I can go pick them up just a pleasant little free train ride away.

The weather, the most boring of topics, has skipped from cold to summer in three days. We looked out the window on Wednesday and said, "Today is our only spring," and it was true. By Friday it was summer and 90 degrees. I walked 20 or so blocks in the sun after work to meet some friends, and when I got there they were sitting inside, hiding from the weather in the air conditioning. "We should sit outside!" I said, and they shivered and said, "No, no, it's too hot."

"I would be perfectly happy if the weather was always exactly like this." I said, and they answered, "Then you moved to the wrong place. This is exceptionally hot even for August here."

We sat outside for a late dinner, under an umbrella that we didn't need for rain or sun, and even I, the first person to get cold in any crowd, kept my jacket off, even at midnight. It was that balmy (balmy is a funny word, no? Like barmy, only less British. Both sound funny.)

I slept with the window open, two nights in a row now, and this may or may not correlate directly with the fact that the sore throat I have had since I returned here at the end of March has returned.

I am beginning to suspect, um, how can I say this... seasonal allergies. I have a hard time admitting such a suspicion, because I have so little patience for the concept of seasonal allergies. I mean, yes, I know that many people are very miserable because of them, but that does not answer the fundamental question: WHY? WHY should some people's bodies start fighting off perfectly innocuous things like POLLEN. Pollen which fertilizes other trees and other flowers? WHY? And why should I have started having a throat-closing sensation during spring while I was in college when I had never had it before in 8 years of Michigan springs? Why should it hve been alleviated by two springs in Rwanda (no spring) and three in New York (no trees), and now actually be at a point where I would consider buying medication if only I had money with which to buy it? Hasn't my body fought off enough things in its time? Did I feed it malaria and parasites and every possible type of street food in every country I've ever been in for nothing? Is it so bored that it has to resort to fighting off things that have no spite against me? I have no patience for such bodily betrayal.

Then again, I don't have all that much patience for how my throat feels like I might not be able to get air through it much longer, either.

fake/real

Intention: answer emails, write nice blog post, fix/print resume, go to bed early.

Actuality: go for long walk in beautiful evening, write nice blog post in head and fail to transfer it to screen, fix/print resume, go to bed too late.

Oops.

tall tales

It is light these days by the time my alarm phone goes off at 6:10 a.m. during the week. I can look out the window in the five o'clock hour and tell that the time for getting up is nearing. It is delicious to wake up at 7 a.m. on Sunday, see the light, roll over, and go back to sleep. It will, unfortunately, make it hard to sleep tonight when I have to go to bed early in anticipation of work.

We went out on Friday night, my friend S. from college and my friend E. from bar class and her friend E2 from high school. E2 got back two months ago from two years in Tanzania and Kenya and was craving the post-Africa therapy that is required during reverse culture shock. We spent much of the evening over artichoke dip and steak fries talking about long-delayed stand-up bus rides and aggressive prostitutes in Nairobi nightclubs and THE BEST JUICE EVER, fresh passion fruit juice at Java House (highly addicting). It might possibly have been incredibly boring for S. and E., who have not recently returned from Africa and do not need the reverse culture shock talk therapy. I'm actually less in need of the reverse culture shock talk therapy in recent years than I used to be, just because I've come and gone so many times (except for the part where I go on those rants about HOW MISERABLE EVERYTHING WAS IN SOUTHERN SUDAN EXCEPT THAT OF COURSE I WOULD GO BACK, which I do periodically, sorry to all who've had to listen to one), but that doesn't mean I'm not willing and eager to be a part of the reverse culture shock talk therapy. Yes! Who doesn't want to tell stories about getting pulled over 6 times in five weeks by Liberian police because the car I was driving didn't have a license plate, including the one time they told me I was under arrest and I got angry and started yelling and told them that I had a car and they didn't and how exactly did they expect to get me to the police station under those circumstances, huh?

It's a way better story than the current one about how one of my bank accounts has $39 in it and the other is in the red and people keep saying, "This is why you have credit cards," except that I don't have a credit card and I'm glad I don't have one because then my whole paycheck would be done by the time I got it so I'll just be scavenging food from friends for the next four days until the paycheck shows up. The paycheck which will promptly be used to pay back and close out the overdrawn bank account so I will still be broke ergh how did this happen I have not overdrawn a bank account since college and I even called to find out my balance stupid delay in recording uses of the debit card.

Well. That story is not so fun. Bring on the Africa tales!

anecdote

Shockingly busy days; feeling quiet by evening.

At the train stop, a man riding by on a bike handed me a ticket and said, "Don't waste your money. Use this." Over his shoulder, he called, "It's good!"

I was on my way to Trader Joe's and I usually use one ticket to go there and back because they are calculated by time, not distance. I took the ticket and I got on the train and then I sat looking at it closely. That star? Did that mean the ticket was only for someone with a reduced fare ID? That 08:52? Was that a.m. or p.m.?

On the way back, I bought my own ticket. The machine spit out two gold dollars and a silver one. I put them in my left pocket and the ticket in my right. I tore up the old ticket - I didn't want anyone else to get into trouble - and poked it in between the St@rbucks cups sticking out of the trash can.

beddy bye

It is 8:04 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

They still run that thing on the 10 p.m. news. Have you noticed? (The news is at TEN p.m. out here instead of ELEVEN. How weird is that?)

I know where I am, and that is about to head to bed. I thought I had escaped the flu that was going around but no, I just got it after everyone else and have spent the week feeling sick in approximately every part of one's body that can be sick: stomach, joints, throat, head. It's fun, I assure you. Fun!

Yesterday I made the mistake of thinking I felt okay (thank you, copious amounts of ibuprofen) and played wiffle ball in the yard at my friend's parents house. I rocked the wiffle ball, thank you very much. It was sunny and beautiful and I was wearing my lapa wrap-skirt that my mom and I made from African cloth last summer and I was barefoot in the beautiful green grass and airplanes flew over and how could I not play? And then the ibuprofen wore off and the fever and throat pain came rushing back and I went to bed at 8 p.m., like I'm about to do again.

It's been a really long time since I went to bed before it was dark. It's oddly satisfying.

completing

That post this morning didn't go where I intended it to go. It just sort of trailed off. I intended to say something about how during the week, when I'm riding the bus in the morning and rushing about at work and coming home exhausted to my beloved little apartment, I can think of no place in the world I would rather be than right here, right now, but that sometimes on the weekend, when I'm a little tired and a little sick and sleeping for twelve hours at a time and then meandering about doing laundry and dishes and reading the blogs of people who are in places like Rwanda, then I miss that life I always thought was going to be mine.

I was going to say that, and also that adding almond essence to my tea was an excellent idea.

unrelated

During a break in things yesterday, I read parts of a BBC article on the plane crash in Southern Sudan aloud to a friend. "Shocked?" I said at the end. "How can they say Southern Sudanese are shocked at the plane crash? I'm not shocked. Do you know what those planes are? They are single-engine Cessnas flown by Kenyan pilots who are forced to fly 16 hours a day without a break and who send text messages by satellite phone while in the air, or they are Antonovs flown by Russian pilots who are still drunk from the night before and who are beginning their drinking again while in the air. How is anyone shocked when they crash? I flew on about 20 of them and I was always shocked when we didn't crash."

...

Every morning, I take the bus to work. The bus stop is a block over, and I stand next to the covered booth in my tights and heels and wait for the bus. Sometimes one bus comes first, sometimes another. One morning I had just turned the corner when the bus came by and I would have missed it had the driver not known me and my bright blue KLM flight attendant coat and stopped a block early for me. "Isn't it nice when your bus driver knows you?" she asked as she opened the doors for me. I'm beginning to recognize people: the older black man in a suit and a camel coat, the young Asian girl with the skinny jeans, the middle-aged white guy with the floppy hair and the black overcoat. One of my colleagues complained about the bus, how there are so many strange people who take it, how it's better to drive, even though you have to pay for parking, but my buses are filled with people on their way to work and school, people just like me. We all sit in the sunlight as the bus goes down that hill and over that bridge, listening to our music and playing our sudoku and staring out our windows.

I like riding the bus in the morning. It like the time it gives me to wake up. I like the people. I like the fact that I'm not using any more fuel than would be used anyway. I like watching the city go by. I like walking from the bus stop to work, under the rapidly greening trees.

anger

I was in the exercise room, doing the elliptical. There were a couple of guys in there, so the tv was tuned to a basketball game, which is fine. I like basketball. The Celtics were playing the Hawks, which is fine. I like green. I was also listening to Wilbur, the iPod that replaced the fallen Wallace. All was well.

I noticed on the screen that there was a shot of particularly beautiful city that was clearly somewhere not in the West. There were closely crowded, open-windowed, two- and three-story brick buildings surrounded by a ring of blue mountains. "Oooh." I thought, as the scene changed to an aerial shot of a crowded market street. "I need to travel again." The camera zoomed in on a man, maybe Indonesian or Filipino, riding his bike down the street. I was feeling all warm and fuzzy and travel-happy.

And then I heard the voice-over. I had Wilbur's ear buds in my ears, so I didn't catch it exactly, but it went something like this:

"When you need to find the enemy...
The best way is already to be watching them."

I almost threw Wilbur at the tv, but it would have hurt him.

Do you know what this was an advertisement for? THE AIR FORCE. The freaking US AIR FORCE is advertising themselves by portraying entire cities and perfectly normal people going about their perfectly normal business as THE ENEMY. Not only that, but they chose THE BROWN PEOPLE.

There is something very, very wrong, and I am going to rant. I have been holding off on the rant, but I can no longer do so when the US Government is advocating racism so utterly blatantly.

People have been way too nice to white people in this country. Barack Obama's speech on race? Way too nice. This is a country whose government thinks it is okay to label anyone non-white as the enemy ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. This is a country in which a white seminarian who I heard preach a few weeks ago said, "When I worked at Target, I was told that you can't use racial profiling, even though it's more likely that minorities will be stealing," and I was the only person in the (all-white) congregation who was irate. This is a country in which white people don't have to notice when things are racist, because they can live their lives in happy little oblivion and say, "But *I'm* not racist. I have black friends!" Guess what, people? I PROMISE you that you have said something racist to your black friends, and your Hispanic friends, and your Asian friends, and your multiracial friends. I know that I have, and I know that I have wanted to beat myself for those stupid things I've said - the ones I realized, anyway - every day since.

White people in this country are NOT innocent. Oh, sure, some of us can point out that our ancestors came here only 50 years ago, or 100. But you know what? My grandparents, when they came here in 1950, could start a business and make money from the consolidated wealth of white America, an America that would not have hired a black man, or a Latino man with an accent, the way they would hire my white, accented Pops. We are NOT INNOCENT.

I miss the days when the difference between Republicans and Democrats was fiscal policy. I almost even miss the days when the difference was abortion. I still voted Democrat then (in my eighth grade Christian school class, I was one of TWO students who voted Democrat in our mock election in 1992 and our teacher said, "Wow, George Bush wishes this were reality"), but I almost miss the days when abortion was the big issue and I could just tell people, "Fine, waste your vote on abortion." Now? Now I am angry. I am angry at a political system that thinks it is okay to claim that Barack Obama got where he was because of race (because no WHITE MAN has ever been elected president?). I am angry at a political system in which people think torture and war are okay, because of "the enemy." I am starting to believe that Republicans want to kill the rest of the world and I have to say, I like the rest of the world and the rest of the world is made up of real people living lives just as real as any of ours here, so this makes me furious.

When I used to fly back and forth to Rwanda, I ended up in a lot of random conversations in airports. One time when I was flying through Detroit, a woman sitting next to me on the floor, waiting for long-delayed flights in the middle of December said to me, "Africa? Aren't they all terrorists over there?"

So fine. Be angry with Obama for claiming that there is xenophobia in rural America. People? There is. There is xenophobia and racism all across this country. When are we going to grow up enough to admit it and do something to change it?

dreamland

I think washing my hair is a waste of time. Actually, I think washing myself in general is a waste of time. Obviously I DO it, because it's socially required and I like feeling clean and it's nice not to have people cringe at my entry into a room, but I think it's a waste of time. I also think peeing is a waste of time, and cutting my fingernails. And that's about it. Just those things.

So the point is that I try to wash my hair as seldom as possible. When I was studying for the bar, that was every three or four days, and ditto when I was in Ethiopia. Now, what with working and the requirement of professional appearances, I end up washing it every other day, a fact that I find most annoying. Think of all the time I could save if I washed it less often. The problem is that by the third or fourth day, I need to put it up, and putting it up generally means, for me, pigtails. I have too round a face for a ponytail or whatever it is you normal-faced people do. Pigtails, or braided pigtails, are not professional. They just aren't.

I woke up several times last night in the middle of strange dreams about Southern Sudan and Liberia, and somehow I started thinking about how I only washed my hair every five or six days in Southern Sudan, and how often, in the morning, when I went over to the barrel-on-a-pole that served as our outdoor shower, there would be only a trickle of water and I would have to suspend my plans for hairwashing. I would go ask the cooks about the water. "Moya?" I would ask hopefully. "Ma-afi," they would say sadly, dragging out the aaaa sound. "Maaaaafi." No water for you.

Then I dreamed about the airport hotel in Liberia, the one that is now an overgrown ruin, and the river that runs behind it. In my dream, someone had built a new hotel next door, and there were families in canoes watching hawks and catching fish in the river, like some friends of ours did on one of the last occasions we stayed there before the war. In my dream, one person caught a six foot tall eel-like fish with a flattened beak-like mouth, and I thought it might be a duck-billed platypus because it could breath on land, and I got out my laptop to google it, sitting on the top of the cement wall by the river at the hotel across from Robertsfield.

Places are swirling strangely in my head.