Gratitude

On the train to Nîmes:

I've been harried the whole day--started this morning when I dropped my credit card somewhere and couldn't find it for an hour (it was in my suitcase), continued in the BIOCOOP as I fretted over which organic cidre and beer to get my next WWOOFing hosts, and followed me all the way onto my transfer train to Lyon when a man who probably is a model--piercing eyes, cheekbones, jawbones, browbones, etc--sat down across from me, giving me the Zoolander look from time to time (I later found out he's a woodworker from Nice). It's 15h10 and I've finally identified the feeling that I've found so unsettling the whole day: I'm not worried. I've been awake since 6 am, caffienated, jittery, trying to stress out and feel productive, but I can't bring myself to do it with any sincerity.

Today I'm going to an unfamiliar French town, tomorrow I go to a stranger's vineyard. I've got too little money, too much baggage, and next to no direction. I've never been so happy and at peace my entire life.

Je suis tellement heureuse

I am in heaven, just had the most amazing 5 hours ever.

Too tired for real sentences, but here are pictures....
--took walk around village
--picked up Chan with Camille
--Camille took us on a tour of the countryside
--went to Camille's friend's estate, where her horse is right now, and hung out with the horses
--made amazingly delicious dinner--vegetable soup, vegetable omelette, rubharb tarte, apple and rhubarb compôte--entirely from things we picked that morning from the garden
--conversed and joked around almost entirely in French, and I didn't end up with a headache!
--all the while Chan was running around the bungalow, yelling, 'C'est quuuuuuoooiiiiiii?' It's her favorite sentence, and she sounds like an angel.

We have a new game to play during dinner: I try to say something, struggle to describe the word while the others listen attentively with their hands folded, and the first person to come up with the word I'm looking for wins. It's a lot of fun, and not lame, really.......or maybe it's the general excess of happiness and contentment in the air here....

Green is 'vert', and preservative is 'conservateur'

It's Monday afternoon here in Quemeneven, and we've finished working for the day. This morning, we worked in the vegetable garden--weeding, plowing, planting, watering. I'm completely exhausted from both the work (first time I've worked in a garden) and from struggling to understand a foreign language for the past 5 or 6 hours, but I've never been this happily exhausted.

Chez Boderiou, there are 5 adults and la petite Chan. The Boderiou adults are Olivier and Camille, and Chan is their angelic 2 years old daughter. Then there are the three woofeuses: a couple, Marie and Justine, and me. Marie and Justine are 100% French. They've been, and are, biking around the country--2000 km so far and no plans to stop anytime soon. We all get along almost surprisingly well, considering the fact that I find communicating with them completely exhausting (there have a lot of 'essaie d'expliquer!' from the others and a lot of sighs from me). It makes for a pretty hiliarious time though. While we were preparing lunch today, Camille mentioned how great it is that we know absolutely everything that goes into our food (I'm on an organic farm), and I agreed, saying that it tastes really good and there aren't preservatives or anything. Except. 'Le préseratif' means 'condom' and not 'preservative', as I thought. A mistake I will never make again.

I have to go soon. Marie came in a while ago and invited me to play tennis with her and Justine, and it's taken me almost an hour to type up this post (French keyboards are pretty darned different from American keyboards). But like most things right now, it takes a while but it happens, et ça marche bien.

La vie en rose, et verte, et rouge, et bleu, et jaune

I am blogging from chez Boderiou--the farm of my host family in a tiny tiny little 'town' in Bretagne. I'm too tired to say too much right now, but I'm pretty much in paradise. Communication is a little difficult because the grown-ups here don't speak much English, I don't speak much French, and the little bèbè doesn't speak much of anything, but this family is unbelievably sweet, everything is mind-bogglingly beautiful, and I am bursting with happiness. I really can't imagine how things can get better, but I've only been here a few hours...we'll see what happens tomorrow!

L'amour

Today I fell in love. My cousin's neighbors asked me to babysit their 18 months old son. The little boy's name is Xiao Xiao, which means "chuckles". He got the name because he makes a high-pitched squeal-laugh about three times a minute.

First we played a game in which he hit me on the head with his toy camel for a long time. Then he drove around the apartment on his toy truck. Then we played tag, but had to stop because he banged his head on his crib ("Oh? Touched head!"). After that he got sleepy and decided to start punching me in the face. At that point it was nap time, and I took pictures of him falling asleep.

I am going to steal Xiao Xiao.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose?

I've been in Beijing for a week, and today I took my sister to the airport for her flight back to LA. After seeing her off, I boarded the express bus back to my cousin's neighborhood. It was pretty much empty, and when I got on, the bus driver was sprawled across the front row, fast asleep. The overhead luggage racks were blocked off by two steel bars, and as I struggled with the idea of decorative luggage racks, the driver's cell phone went off. Ringtone: "Oh, Susanna!", midi remix.

He answered: "Oh, it's you. Yeah I was sleeping, my head still hurts."

"Uh oh?" I thought.

Him: "Yeah, I already took my medication. I guess I'll take it again after I finish napping."

Me: "Severe illness or hangover?"

Him: "The route's not bad, only have two shifts today. Problem is, I've never driven it before, and I have no idea how to get to the station."

Me: "What?"

Him: "No. Why would I ask him? I know the general direction. I'll figure it out. No one's in a hurry anyway."

Me: "What?"

Him: "I wouldn't have even taken this Saturday morning shift, 'cept they fired me last Wednesday and I'm doing this as a favor."

Me: "Maybe I'll take the train...."

I considered whether my fear of this possibly terminally-ill, heavily-medicated, inexperienced, recently-unemployed bus driver outweighed my laziness, but before I could talk myself into getting off the bus, the driver turned around and grunted in my direction.

"Kid," he said.

"Yes?"

"Have you taken this bus before?"

"No, I'm new to this area."

"So you don't know how to get to the Tongzhou station?"

"Sorry..."

"Shit."

Then he put on his sunglasses, reclined his seat, and went back to sleep. I decided to stay.

I like to consider this the beginning of my adventures. Recently, I wandered Beijing with someone who's been backpacking around the world for the past eleven months. He gave me a reference on couchsurfing.org and said that I know exactly what I like and what I dislike. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but such self-awareness doesn't seem to be a trait that's conducive to the type of traveling that I want to do. In fact, I'm not even sure if this is the type of person I want to be. When I bought my tickets to China and France, I had "wanderlust" in mind. I don't know what this term means exactly, but it feels like the type of loafing Larry Darrell wanted to do--life, liberty, and the embrace of happiness. How did I get from there to having all my likes and dislikes figured out?

I've got a lot to learn, especially from the crazy bus driver.

I feel like I'm trapped in a David Sedaris story

Last week, I came back to Chicago to volunteer at bible camp and to clear out my apartment. I'm not the most functional person ever, but I thought surely I could pack up my closet and sell my kitchen supplies in 7 days--most of my stuff was shipped back in June. I envisioned a neatly packed suitcase; an ad on marketplace that would result in a mad scramble for my beloved utensils, knives, and random gadgets; and 6 days of preemptive nostalgia spent wandering the various places at which I've gotten drunk out of my mind.

Reality has been different. Turns out a morning spent running after little kids, followed by half an hour on a moon-bounce trying not to get crushed, followed by a long walk home in the steam room that is Chicago, is really exhausting. Plus, the knowledge that I'm finally going to Europe has turned me into a crazed insomniac, staying up into the wee hours to research Bordeaux, hostels, and sketchy Eastern European airlines. As a result, I come home from camp, collapse onto the couch, and read Sedaris until the insomnia kicks in at around 11 and I begin my virtual tour of Europe.

This life-style is not so conducive to sanity. Yesterday, I got into an epic fight with my parents that resulted in several fits of hysteria and culminated with me writing an angry e-mail to my parents telling them that I was not going to China, not going to Europe, and that I was going to go home, pick up my dog, move out, and find a job. HA! I thought, that'll show them.

I curled up in bed and put on Pink Floyd. Every now and then, I shed some self-congratulatory tears. What better way to punish my parents than to be miserable and do everything they ever hoped that I would do? A few hours later, I still hadn't received an apologetic call from my parents, so I decided to check-in on them. They seemed to be having a dinner party and were confused when I asked, choking back tears, if they had read my e-mail. My mom asked me if I had eaten, since it was so late in Chicago. I told her, "No. I don't want to eat. I'm going to vomit.", hoping she could hear the period at the end of the sentence and the bitterness in my heart. She said that skipping dinner was good for losing weight, but at least I should drink some warm water, whereupon I hung up on her.

I woke up this morning not knowing what to do with myself. There wasn't camp on Saturday; I didn't have a tour of China or Europe to plan; and I couldn't go out because I had nothing packed, nothing sold, a flight back to LA on Monday, and plans all of Sunday. I thought it best to stay home and do responsible things, so I sat down and spent the day reading Sedaris.

Periodically, my mom would call and ask how packing was going, if I had eaten, if I had sold any of my things, if I was tired, if I had any problems only a mother could solve. I tried to limit my answers to "yes" or "no", taking care to use "no" as often as possible. An hour ago, I realized I couldn't actually fit all my stuff into the bags I had planned to check, and was starting to panic when my mom called again. This time she offered her UPS account and said I could always just screw it and throw my crap away so that I could go to bed. I told her, "No." and hung up. Then I went to the UPS website and scheduled a pickup for Monday morning.

I was really upset to find my anger and resentment at my parents going away. Here was a woman who is fundamentally against my pursuit of happiness, and my dad is no better. They conspired against my independence and wanted more than anything to turn me into a puppet-daughter. If I had any backbone, I would refuse their support, renounce them as family, and run away. Money wouldn't be a problem because one day a famous director (Wes Anderson?) would discover Freddy, and I would make millions as the agent of the cutest dog in the world. Freddy would spend his life being loved by every person on the planet, and when he went back to Heaven, I would devote my life to writing devastatingly witty books.

Until then, though, I guess I'm stuck with my parents. Sure, they took over my travel plans and now I'm signed up for a guided tour of the South with my uncle and little sister, during which I will see a tree or two and 800 million weary, screaming tourists. And maybe they think guilt is the most effective method of persuasion. But, they're also the ones who call with a way to get my things home just as I start to hear David Sedaris whisper in my head, "If only you were a gay man high on cocaine, you wouldn't be such a failure at packing."

I wanted to go to the Norton Simon this afternoon but decided to take a nap instead.

On my way home from the delicious lunch that convinced me to skip the NS, I passed a huge church with two giant balloon angels in front. In front of the angels, there was a sign written in Chinese that said something to the effect of, "VIP parking this way."

Perhaps they were expecting Jesus.

Oh, Kindle!

I had planned to go to the Getty Villa today, but I decided to stay home and wait for my Kindle instead.

It just got here and is definitely worth missing the Villa. The Kindle is so wonderful; I am so in love. Kindle, I love you. I want to take you places and read with you.

**update**

The Kindle would be a lot better if I could actually buy Kindle books. As of now, my Kindle will remain empty until Bank of America decides to mail my new credit and debit cards to Los Angeles instead of Chicago. Way to go, Amazon--why doesn't your Kindle store accept bank transfers when your 35 million other stores do?

A benediction

Last Sunday I went to the Pasadena Humane Society in a desperate attempt to find Freddy. He wasn't there, although a dog that looked exactly like him was. For some reason, the rather painful sight of another adorable black and white shih-tzu at the shelter made me hopeful that Freddy is still alive, maybe in a another shelter. Despite the voice of reason telling me I was setting myself up for a lot of misery, I called the microchip company.

I'd been putting this off for months because the thought of hearing another person recognize that Freddy is missing makes me want to puke, so imagine my surprise when the operator told me that someone found him that morning and brought him to the PHS. After a lot of hysterical, strangled, joyous incredulity from me, the operator realized the incident report he was looking at was actually from April. In short, I pulled out of the PHS parking lot in tears. I do not recommend driving while crying. It is hard to see.

Anyway, I decided to go to the mall and engage in some retail therapy, but I guess between the heat and the crying and the overwhelming self-pity, I got lost in the beautiful labyrinth that is San Marino. While pondering metaphor implicit in literally losing my way after losing my dog, I found myself suddenly at the gates of the Huntington compound/library/arboretum/museum/whatever--this place. I hadn't been in about 15 years and parking was free, so I pulled in.

There are lots of awesome things at the Huntington, not to mention an award winning gift shop, and Coleridge's annotated copy of his own book (anyone wanna to help me steal it?). What I can't get out of my mind, however, is a quote from the Annals: An Account of the Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, from his Birth to his Eleventh Year, written by himself, painted on a wall in the Johnson exhibit:

"I was born at Lichfield. My mother had a very difficult and dangerous labor, and was assisted by George Hector, a man midwife of great reputation. I was born almost dead, and could not cry for some time. When he had me in his arms, he said, 'Here is a brave boy.' "

I stood there reading these sentences over and over, more confused each time. Why did Hector say Johnson was brave? because he didn't (couldn't) cry? because he was almost dead, but not quite? because he thought it would encourage the uncomprehending baby to live? because life is nothing but adversity and Sam Johnson left the womb anyway? Why does Johnson start his autobiography with this annecdote? Is "man" really necessary in the description of George Hector's profession? Shouldn't someone have said to Mrs. Johnson, "Here is a brave mother?"

Why did the exhibit planners stick this stupid, enigmatic quote on the wall?

I'm not sure why I wanted answers to these questions, or why I even asked them in the first place. Realistically, it was probably because I was hot and tired and the lazy bum in me realized that standing still was easier than walking, and reading something at eye level was easier than peering down into the display cases. For the sake of argument though, let's say it was because I read those sentences and thought, "I feel almost dead, and haven't allowed myself to cry for some time. I wish someone would take me up and say, 'Here is a brave girl.' "

I pictured Johnson hunched over a table, putting his childhood into words on a candle-lit page. This man, whose contributions to the English language are apparently outranked only by Shakespeare and God, chose to introduce himself as "a brave boy." What was happening in his life as he wrote these words? Maybe he had just left Oxford, brilliant but impoverished and unable to pay his tuition. Was he in his 40s, a struggling writer with an ailing wife 21 years older than him, working on a dictionary of the English language that would consume 10 years of his life? Could he have been suffering one of many bouts of manic depression? Perhaps King George III had just granted him a £300 pension for the Dictionary. Or maybe he was working on his edition of Shakespeare, counting the clock that tells the time, and seeing the brave day sunk in hideous night.

I hope George Hector, the man midwife of great reputation, didn't actually call a newborn whose greatest and only accomplishment was to not be dead a brave boy. I hope the story wasn't made up by Johnson's mother, a belated apology for sending him out to a tubercular wetnurse. I like to think that it was an act of artistic license. I like the idea of Johnson, the Great English Writer, mucking through one of the many low points of his life, bestowing upon himself a small benediction. And maybe this is the only form of bravery that matters.

Questions about Tibet

Disclaimer:  I am Chinese.

For many, many years, I was a supporter of "freeing Tibet".  My parents and I regularly fought about the oppressive regime in China and the Chinese government's wanton disregard for human, especially religious, rights.  When my parents brought up anything about Tibet being not so great itself, I would scornfully reject it as a product of their Communist education.  Tibet was the paragon of a peaceful order destroyed by the CCP in its quest for world, or at least regional, domination.

In the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, Tibet was once again brought to the forefront of the world's attention.  There is absolutely no doubt that what China is doing in Tibet is terrible.  The authoritarian control of media access to events in Tibet, incarceration of monks and journalists, and general acts of violence and human rights abuses are deplorable.  Furthermore, the erasing of an entire culture through "assimilation" is in many ways worse than outright conquest.  This tactic of insinuation gives the perpetrators a moral loophole--an excuse of multiculturalism--that allows them to justify what they are doing.  I want to be clear that I do not support the current Chinese policies in Tibet.  

However, I have problems with what the movement for "freeing Tibet" is actually asking for.  I have problems with how the Western media portrays China as the destroyers of a peaceful society, and the attempts to galvanize the world in aiding Tibet to restore proper order and religious freedom to their stolen kingdom.  Consider for a moment, what do you actually know about Tibetan history?  What was the structure of their society before the Communists came?  Why is the "old Tibet" considered a Shangri-la?

I read this article about a year ago.  I do not pretend to have followed up on its claims; I have not done the research to validate any of its arguments or statements.  What I am concerned with is why the contents of this article, and of the sources (books, journal articles, interviews) it cites, are not more widely discussed.  The author, and his sources, claim that Tibet was a slave society, one in which serfs, criminals, and "criminals" were oppressed through systematic torture led by the Dalai Lama and his lords.  Why is there not even an awareness of this history of Tibet--even if this awareness was just, "Looney journalists and authors and historians wrote crazy things about Tibet that have been discounted and dismissed as inaccurate"?

The fact that most of the public is NOT aware of this account of Tibet makes me wonder what the true purposes of the "Free Tibet" movement actually are.  It seems as if such activism may be more of a symptom of sinophobia than an actual desire for the well-being of Tibetans.  I know this will be extremely offensive to many, and I know that many, many people genuinely care about religious freedom and equality.  But do people actually know what the implications of liberating Tibet are?  Chinese Communism, especially in the 50s, was not categorically evil.  But somehow, half a century later, the world seems to believe "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."  

Perhaps I am letting my ethnic biases influence my judgment, and I am the first to concede that possibility.  Yet if you look up the entry for Tibet on Wikipedia (true source for all that is factual and holy in the world, of course), there is not one mention of the societal structure of Tibet before the Communists came; Tibetan history consists of a long list of the various powers that have ruled Tibet.  This is lack of information is pretty much unique to the article on Tibet (look up France, the United States, or for that matter, China).  

Why is there no discussion of life in Tibet before 1951?  I'm afraid that this is one question that will remain unanswered because we won't like what the answer will be.

I have figured out the secret to cooking for one:

Use (super) small pots and pans.

Thoughts on waiting

I'm reading a novel that is set in Communist China (1960s-1980s) and one of the central characters is a woman from the rural Northeast who has bound feet. She is basically abandoned by her husband and is left to take care of his ailing parents (and eventually their graves), the house, their daughter, and the fields. Every year for the past 18 years, her husband comes back from the army hospital he works at to divorce her. Every year, she agrees to be divorced, but for various reasons, her husband has never been granted a divorce.

This woman reminded me of my paternal grandmother--I say "reminded" and not "reminds" because as far as I know, the only things they have in common are years of hardship and bound feet. My grandmother and I have never been close. Even though she (and my grandfather) lived with us for two years, I spent my childhood mostly with my mom's parents. Once I came to America, I rarely talked to anyone in my extended family. Also, my grandmother considered it a part of the natural order that she make all her daughter-in-laws' lives hell, and I viscerally hate anyone who hurts my mom.

And so, until about a week ago, I found it quite comfortable to file my grandmother under "bad people" and had no intentions of reexamining whether or not she deserved to be disliked by her own granddaughter. It never occurred to me that she would have a backstory. Well, this is not exactly true--it never occurred to me that I should care about her backstory. For some reason, I care now.

Until her sons got comfortable jobs in the city and transferred their parents out of the countryside, my grandmother worked in the field and around the house, from sunrise till sunset, nonstop, on her bound feet. She was beaten by her husband, abused physically and emotionally by the family she married into, and had no choice but to submit to her circumstances. I wonder what this kind of life does to a person's spirit, how endless inescapable suffering twists your soul, and I wonder, does your past justify your present?

I wish I had taken the trouble to get to know my grandmother better. She lived through a cultural revolution; she was born a peasant and now has her own condo in a resort town on the coast; her feet are bound and her grand-daughters are worried about birth-control; she is now in her mid-nineties although a decade ago the doctors said her lymphoma was so advanced she'd have at most six weeks to live. 17 years ago, she had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body and she has been wheelchair-bound since. My grandmother should be a fascinating woman.

Unfortunately, I will never be able to ask her the questions that I now want to. She has Alzheimer's and doesn't even know who she is most of the time, much less who I am. It took me two decades to develop an active interest in my own grandmother, and this interest has come too late. My regrets are somewhat assuaged by the knowledge that she has finally found peace. My mom went back to see her last year, and she said my grandmother's eyes are no longer filled with venom and spite and loathing. She has the innocence of a three-year-old and is happy for probably the first time in her life. God, it seems, has finally given her His mercy.

But, (characteristically) I can't help but be sad. Two years ago, my maternal grandfather passed away. I loved him, and I never got a chance to thank him for those afternoons he spent flying kites with me in the park, the red flowers full of nectar that he picked for me to suck on, for calling me "da bao" when I was the youngest person in the family, for letting me ride my tricycle around his house. He died thousands of miles away, and I couldn't even go to the funeral. I hadn't even talked with him in over a year. I know this is not unique to me, but it really never occurred to me that someone I love so much could die before I got the chance to "make things right". I guess I thought he would wait for me.

I had been operating under the assumption that there would be time to do all the things I wanted and that were important to me. If there is time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate, time for a hundred indecisions and visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea, surely there would be time for the bigger things! It never occurred to me that God would dangle a desire in front of me and snatch it away before I had been satisfied. My God is a merciful god, and I think I am just now starting to realize that my definition of "merciful" is inadequate. When you think of all the opportunities you miss, all the chances that you either rebuff or that are taken away from you, it's enough to drive a person mad.

I don't and can't understand God's mercy. I think I need to just accept it and stop asking so many damned questions. Until we find a way to tap into God's mind or develop more reliable methods of fortune telling, it's probably best to remember the Count's words as he finally sails off with Haydée--all of human wisdom can be summed up in two words: "wait" and "hope".

Prof. Rosenberg brought up same-sex marriage and CA in our seminar. I cringed.

In the season 5 premier of The Hills (amazing, btw!), Heidi's mom tries to convince Heidi that Spencer is actually an asshole by ambushing her with an ex-boyfriend and attempting to reunite them in an embarrassingly obvious and tactless way. I hope it was in jest, but the failed match-making was interesting because it only seemed to reinforce Heidi's strange notion that Spencer is the man of her dreams. What is it about getting overwhelmed with one set of information that makes us bolt in the opposite direction?

Last Tuesday, Vermont's legislature overrode the governor's veto on a bill that allowed gays to marry. As a resident of California and a "bleeding-heart liberal", I was deeply mortified by this. Of course I'm happy for Vermont--clearly Vermont has a better grasp on equality and civil rights than California, and I'm glad that gays in Vermont now have the same basic right to marriage--but California. We're the Golden State! we've got San Francisco! and Hollywood!

And Prop 8. Prior to the election, many friends reassured me that Californians would never pass Prop 8. No way would one of the most liberal states in the country take away the right to marry from gays. But we did. Why? I still don't quite understand, but I'm beginning to think that it's because gay rights is such an issue in California. Its very prominence galvanizes the opposition. The fact that many of us support the right of gays to marry gives conservatives something to rally around. Gays and gay-rights are a part of the Californian culture. People are constantly forced to face it--and they think about it without actually thinking about it. Many people (apparently more than half of California) see it as something foreign and strange and automatically reject it. They don't understand that the point of the law is to filter out these prejudices, to erase class and race and religion and every other distinction on which discrimination is based.

In Federalist 78, Hamilton argues that it is the role of judges "to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the ill effects [of] ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which...have a tendency...to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community." For a while I considered writing to the California Supreme Court to remind them of Hamilton's words. I wanted them to tell them that they had at least one supporter who recognized that they were doing the very thing that our Founders thought they should be doing. They did the right thing, and for some reason it angered Californians so much that we passed a proposition to shut them up.

The worst part about all this is that it is unlikely that the California Supreme Court will overturn Prop 8. Doing so would set a precedent that would make propositions practically meaningless, but it is mind-numbingly unfair that such a basic right will be sacrificed in the name of legal continuity.

If California's highest court backs down and does the unjust thing (upholding Prop 8), I will start a new initiative in the next election cycle. I will propose another Prop 8, again to protect marriage, but this time to make divorce unconstitutional. If there are people who are shameless enough to ban gay marriage to "protect the sacred institution of marriage", let's help them really protect marriage. California has stopped reporting its divorce rates, but I'm pretty sure there are more straight people wanting to get divorced than there are gay people wanting to get married. It seems to me that the real and more pressing assault on the sanctity of marriage is straight people thinking of marriage as a disposable commodity, not gay people in love.

Hail to the Chief

How great is it to finally at long last have a president of whom we are not ashamed to send to other countries?  Thank you, President Obama.

****update****

I tried to go jogging today, but when the wind vetoed that idea, I decided to just power-walk around Hyde Park.  On 48th street, there is a block that is kind of fenced off, but there were still people coming in and out, so I thought I'd go check out where President Obama's house probably is.  I set foot on the sidewalk and this exchanged occurred:

Policewoman: "MA'AM.  WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!  MA'AM!  WHERE ARE YOU GOING?"

me: "ummm....i'm just...trying to work out?...."

Policewoman: "NOT ON THIS BLOCK YOU'RE NOT!  DO YOU LIVE HERE?"

me: "no....i live a few blocks south?...."

Policewoman: "MA'AM, YOU NEED TO LEAVE."

me: "okay...."

That's alright, Mr. President, I forgive you.  =)

Oh, the Life of the Mind

I am having dinner in Hutch (for those of you who don't know, it's a dining commons) behind a couple who presumably are on a first date. I can't help overhearing their conversation as the guy is practically screaming, and really, the world needs to know about this date because this is the date that many of us have here. Even if this is not a date, it's pretty emblematic of how social interactions are at UChicago.

Let me set the scene: imagine the dining hall at Hogwarts, only instead of floating candles, uncomfortably large oil paintings of past presidents ring the room. Light meanders from three giant chandeliers, and as they are probably almost a hundred years old, the lighting is pretty dim--or romantic.

When I first sat down, the couple was leaning towards each other from across the table. A few minutes after I started eating, the guy began postulating loudly about his theory on bar mitzvahs and functionalism (he is Jewish), and since then, the girl has been slowly leaning back and sinking further and further into her chair, legs crossed, as the guy advances closer and closer towards her.

To add to the excitement, the guy sounds an awful lot like a Chipmunk--only, a self-satisfied, intellectual snob of a Chipmunk. His sentences tend to stray upward in pitch, and he makes awkward hand gestures to emphasize "key points". These mannerisms got pretty out of control when he got to the part about his cousin getting a 57k bar mitzvah. Every once in a while, I could just barely hear an "oh, really?" or "huh, that's interesting" coming from the girl.

As the girl started collecting her trash, the guy made suggestions that they go back to his dorm room to watch a movie "or something." To this, the girl replied, "Oh no thanks, I just started my first class today and you know...I want to keep up with the work and get an early start." To which the guy replied, "Oh yeah, I completely understand. Are you still taking French?" "Yeah..." And then he proceeded to give her a lesson on interrogative sentences and "est-ce que".

Poor girl. Poor us.

Questions about war, murder, genocide, and gratuitous deaths; plus, answers to my own questions

George Clooney and I have an on-again, off-again, one-sided/imaginary relationship. It's been on recently and I have been pretty obsessed with him. Actually, "obsessed" is an understatement--if he knew what percentage of my time and thoughts are devoted to him, he would and should be worried.

Luckily, it has not all been bad/creepy: one of the few productive things that has come out of all this is that in an attempt to become interested in his interests, I have been doing a lot of reading on various humanitarian crises, mainly in Sudan and Myanmar (good starting points: Not On Our Watch and Nicholas Kristof's columns). If you have not devoted entire days to reading about genocidal regimes, and innocent people having their eyes gouged out, and children getting limbs blown off, and gang rapes, and tens of thousands of people starving to death while the international community mostly twiddles their thumbs, some words of advice: have a puppy around or listen to some Disney music, because it's a quick jump from "I'm sad" to "I no longer have the will or desire to live in a world like this."

The more I learn about this stuff, the more incomprehensible everything becomes and the more confused I get (I find this is true of most things). In order to deal, I've formulated a working thesis, and I'm interested to hear how others feel about it: There are some things worth dying for, but there is absolutely nothing that is worth killing for.

When I came across especially heinous atrocities, two questions overwhelm me. First, how can anyone commit these crimes? And second, what kind of people are we (you, me, every single person who is aware in any way of these crimes) such that we are not doing everything we can to stop it? The only answers I have come up with to these two problems are completely inadequate, yet I still feel the need to share them because I have wracked my brains and I really can't come up with anything else.

My response to the first question: I don't think the people doing these horrible things actually understand what they are doing. Clearly they've thought about it to the extent of, "take gun, shoot person" or whatever, and maybe they even think they've got a reason to do it, but I don't think they actually understand the consequences of what they do. I am sure they don't feel the consequences of what they do, because it is unfathomable that a sentient being can come across that kind of suffering and allow it to happen, much less cause it to happen.

When I read about the regimes in Sudan and Myanmar cutting off humanitarian aid to millions of people so that they will slowly die of hunger and thirst and related diseases, I try to imagine what it's like to be a refugee. I fail to do this, because I have no capacity to understand that sort of suffering. The best I can do (and my best is very lame) is to remember some pretty extreme diets I've been on. I know what it's like to be hungry all the time for a long time, and I know how intensely miserable that is, but I know that I got through it because I knew there was food to be eaten at some point in the future and because I did it to myself. How must it feel to know that the awful empty feeling would continue and worsen until the moment you die? To know that starving to death is the best possible thing that could happen to everyone around you?

The regimes and people causing such situations must have never thought about this, and because they haven't, they can allow people to die this way.

As for the people who go around shooting, torturing, raping, disfiguring people, I don't think they think beyond the moment their act is over. I don't think they ever consider how it must be to live with the consequences of their actions--whether it be for the members of the community who witnessed the event, or for the person who has to live with the memory of violation. They know they have a thing to do so they do it, and then they move on to the next horrific thing. Perhaps they do these things because the act itself gives them pleasure, but I refuse to accept the idea that it is the pleasure of their victim's suffering that makes them do it. I don't think this is true because such a realization is so repulsive that it would be debilitating. No one can realize such a thing about themselves and still go on living. They don't really understand the things they're doing or they wouldn't do them.

The very obvious flaw in this reasoning is that if bad people do bad things because they don't realize these things are bad, then just show them how much it sucks to be on the receiving end and people will stop doing bad things. Sometimes, I imagine the UN taking Bashir around Darfur and Chad and showing him the terrible things he's done, and when he realizes how awful he is, he would be overwhelmed with remorse and repent and devote the rest of his life to undoing in some small measure the disaster he created. I imagine diplomats showing videos of mutilated women, of disfigured children, of men with their eyes gouged out being led around by their wives and children, to the leaders in China and the Chinese leaders would break down in tears and stop giving weapons to these horrible regimes. Then I get even more confused because if this is how it should happen, why hasn't it happened, why doesn't it happen?

I have no answer for that.

Which leads me to my second question and my pathetic response: there isn't much that I or the people I know can do about these situations. I don't have much money to give, and even if I could make a sizable contribution to aid-relief organizations, they're being kicked out of the disaster-zones so the money wouldn't make a huge difference anyway. I've taken personality tests for volunteer organizations and failed miserably because I don't have the strength to not become a useless, sobbing, hysterical mess when faced with such intense suffering, so no one will take me as a volunteer. I sign petitions and write messages to people with more power than I do, but I sincerely doubt the utility of those things. I'm probably just making excuses for my inaction, but the money I "have" isn't mine to give away, and the time that I have no one will take. But the thing that really gets me is the people in power--Obama, Clinton, the UN, the EU, Bush, Cheney, Rice--all talk about how awful everything is but let it continue! What have they (other than France) actually done about it? If the whole world agrees that the mess in Darfur and Myanmar and the Congo and all those places is terrible, can the whole fucking world not put a stop to it? Who the hell is Bashir anyway that he can successfully fend off the free world for six years and go on killing people and ruining lives? When your job actually entails international relations and politics and "spreading democracy/peace", what can be more important than putting an end to mass killings?

I don't understand this, probably because my world-view is too simplistic.

This post has degenerated into a rant, but I will shirk responsibility and blame it on the time (4 am) and my strong feelings on these issues. As a result of years of training, I've got to make some sort of effort to tie in my thesis. So I'll end with this: I don't know where life comes from--meiosis/cell division, Mother Nature, God, general cosmic forces, whatever--but I sure know that no human being has ever handed life to another. No person has ever given life, and no person has the right take it away. It doesn't matter how righteous your cause is, it doesn't matter if you are defending the Union or fighting off Nazis. Unless you've got the explicit approval of general biological processes/Nature/God/the Cosmos, if you take what is not yours, you are a thief and a criminal. Even the most monstrous person is still a person, he still has a family, he still has feelings and thoughts. No one short of Jesus Christ is, has been, or will be in a position to judge whether another has a right to live.

Sometimes, I feel like this cat.

New beginnings necessitate rambling

I'm all settled in Hyde Park, and tomorrow I go back to LA for a week before coming back for Spring Quarter and (finally!) graduating. With a lot of help from my friends, I've really started to feel at home here, for the first time ever. It's true that the weather sucks, and sometimes when I walk by a homeless person arguing with himself, I still get scared, but this is the place where I am an independent, useful, productive member of society. This is the place where I can be proud of myself.

The last 10 days has made me realize that a lot of my previous dislike of Chicago was a product of me being mad at everything around me for making me feel guilty about being a bad/non student. When it comes down to it, the University of Chicago is a great school: there is a lot of hard work involved, but that's the only way you get smart; not everyone here is drop dead gorgeous, but I'd rather talk to a person than stare at one, anyway. The longer I am here, the more convinced I am that this is where I should be. Thursday night, a friend and I power-walked to her apartment after dinner. It was probably 10 degrees outside (without windchill), and despite the fact that it hurt my lungs and face to talk, I couldn't help telling her how great it was to be with people who can walk faster than some people can jog.

After a year in exile, it is such a relief to be with similar people doing similar things.

A lot of this week has been spent pondering, mostly because my mind wanders when I am reading course packets. One revelation has been about my relationship with my mom (yeah yeah, cliché). I'm starting to understand how intensely she cares, and has always cared, about every aspect of my life. Sometimes when the things she wants me to do are too hard and I am too lazy, I resent her for being nosy and annoying, but I've come to realize that at those times, the fault is mine. It is only after I started doing those hard things that I've appreciated how tiring it must be to push someone forward when that person doesn't want to go, how much dedication and willpower it must take to keep pushing when it's easier let that person fall and just get along. When I think about how long she's done this for me, I am overwhelmed with gratitude, and I hope that I can be capable of loving someone that much.

Some things, however, remain the same. I'm supposed to be studying for a class that I have to make up. It's taught by my (AMAZING!) ba advisor so I absolutely must-have to-WILL finish the work. Unfortunately, I've spent the night eating, blogging, and researching blogging (which basically consisted of reading my friend's blog). Oh well, guess I will be better tomorrow--at least I get points for being sober two Saturday nights in a row in Chicago!