words are all we have

Photos from Hoi An

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:39:42 GMT

Hoi An Bicycle
Originally uploaded by Little Ayun.

Hoi An is every bit the tourist trap I was warned about: High prices for everything, too many souvenir shops to count, and attractions that at times seemed entirely beside the point. But you know what? I loved every minute there. My first full day in Hoi An happened to coincide with the tenth anniversary of its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site, so all of the paid houses and assembly halls were free and open to the public so I spent the whole day methodically working my way down each street in the old town, wandering through creaky buildings and exuberantly-decorated courtyards. Though the town is in perpetual restoration, it's also perpetually collapsing, and constantly damaged by annual storms (a direct typhoon hit this year, about two months before my visit) that's business as usual and sees boats shuttling people down flooded streets.

So everything is all crumbling flaking walls next to freshly-painted glossy black wooden facades, lanterns in the entryway of every building, car-free streets (walkers and "primitive vehicles" only!) and these tasty chili sauce-topped miniature wonton-looking things in the market next to the river. Also a French-style bakery with really really good chocolate croissants served warm, my first brush with bootleg DVD shopping (a dangerous new hobby) and a tailor recommended by a local friend where I had a bunch of clothes made super-fast and super-cheap (ditto).

The best moment of my stay there was when I poked my head into a no-name temple at the very far end of one of the old town streets and found an incense workshop where a woman worked a foot pedal-operated machine to coat sticks with perfume paste with that I-have-been-doing-this-a-long-time-and-know-how-to-do-it-in-the-most-efficient-practiced-and-beautiful-way-possible style. I could have watched her all day.

Photos from Hue

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:09:32 GMT

Citadel Snail
Originally uploaded by Little Ayun.

Nearly every photo I posted is not of Hue itself, but of the monuments and landmarks that draw visitors. But for the record, Hue has a narrow backpacker's alley crammed with cheap hotels, white guys with dreads* and bars serving Tiger beer in very large bottles. It also has schools along the main road between the train station and the backpacker's alley, and if you choose to walk the kilometer and a half or so from the train station with the two German girls who shared your train compartment and gave you Dalat wine the night before which you drank out of sliced-up water bottles, you will attract a lot of attention from the school kids, maybe because everyone takes cabs from the train station, or maybe because your backpack (your backpack, not the German girls') is about the size of your entire body and looks very full even when it's empty which, at this point in the trip, anyway, it was.

Hue also has, by my reckoning, the best pho-you-get-from-a-lady-with-a-big-pot-outside-the-market. The broth is spicy, but not intensely so, and I don't know what those meatballs were made out of but they were amazing, and I think it cost 13,000 dong, about 70 cents.

* All backpackers are douches to some extent, especially the ones who obsess over labels and coin terms like 'flashpacker' that douches like me then use. But this trip was my first exposure to South-East Asia-visiting backpackers and oh my god are they the douchiest.

Things I Cannot Bear To Throw Away (Yet)

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:15:13 GMT

A postcard from 1997 advertising a play at the NeoFuturarium in Chicago called "Free Day At The Ugly Zoo." The Illustration is a drawing of a jacked-up chihuahua wth patchy hair exclaiming "EHNÑGH!" captioned "A different kind of animal."
Membership card for the Yahoo! Cafe in Tokyo, where I filled out a form to get free internet access in March of 2002.
A pink six-armed rubber monster finger puppet filched from the vegan donut tower/wedding cake at L and M's reception in Seattle, August 2006.
A 33-cent Big Bird postage stamp.
Any of the sticker pictures.
Any of the ticket stubs, including those for forgettable movies seen so long ago the text on the stub has faded away to near nothing but not totally. Four different ones for Trainspotting, held together with a paper clip. Kicking and Screaming, when Erica stayed in her seat resolutely through the credits and after the house lights came back up. I'm waiting for the ending, she said.
Any of the birthday cards, thank you cards, postcards and just-because cards.
The cigar box with the pretty label that is still empty because I never found just the right thing to put inside it because I realized today that just the right thing might be tealights.
Printed Engrish instructions for my Japanese-made yarn swift, even though I know perfectly well how to use it, and am very unlikely to ever forget.
A poetry anthology from one of my high school lit classes that I probably haven't opened since the last time I moved and poked into every single book I own. Not, like, an anthology of poetry by high schoolers, an anthology of real poetry by grownups that is kind of like the poetry equivalent of those Super [Decade]'s CD anthologies that you used to see commercials for on late-night television. Nothing but the greatest hits. Of poetry.

Not much, really.

Being An Adult

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:54:44 GMT

To me, adulthood has always been mostly about autonomy. I was an independent kid, and the best thing, still, about not being a kid anymore is not having to ever ask permission. Sure, in many contexts, it's a good idea (especially if it involves eating the last bit of something good in the fridge) but it's not an absolute requirement. Though it's not something I've ever seriously considered, the option of burning my life down to the ground is always there, and it's something I value. I get to decide. I can consult others, seek advice if I feel like it, and sometimes, sure, other people make decisions that affect me, but there are no permission forms. I'm about a decade into true, nobody's-business-but-mine adulthood, and still sometimes thrilled by it, electric bills and all. Because if I wanted to, if I felt like dealing with the consequences, I could stop paying the electric bill.

And, of course, the quickest route to autonomy is financial independence. I had my first W-2 job at 14, skipping study halls to work the periodicals desk in my high school library, and I've been hooked ever since. Money, especially money in the bank, is a form of potential energy, and more of it means more choices, including the choice to do nothing at all. If anything, I err on the side of "nothing at all," but I always seem to let loose a little around Christmastime, adhering to the "one for you, one for me" philosophy of gift shopping. Saturday I spent a few hours bouncing around Harvard Square, and topped off the expedition by gifting myself with a new winter hat. I had a similar, though less-obnoxious one that I got three years ago at a Christmas market in Union Square, egged on by damiel , but I lost it at some point, and all I've got now is quasi-respectable knitted wool hats.* I basically haven't taken it off since Saturday, wearing it around the clock, indoors and out. I'm working from home today, but if I were at the office, I'd be wearing it there, too. Based on my description of it, a friend noted that one of the preschoolers she works with has the same one. I told her "preschool" was the look I was going for.

I'm working from home because I had some bank stuff to do today. Basically, I had to empty a money market account so that tomorrow some things can get signed and Andy and I can become homeowners, in a highly constrained and idiosyncratic fashion, sure, but genuine in the ways that matter. We have to hand over the equity payment for our new co-op apartment, in addition to all the signing, and that meant an in-person visit to the bank. I took care of that just after lunch,** and if the headiness of being handed a five-figure check representing years of savings wasn't enough to get me jazzed, conducting that (to me) very significant piece of business while wearing my brand new panda face earflap hat certainly did. Shit gets signed tomorrow, the place is officially ours on the 1st, and a new tenant arrives in this place February 1, at which point I'll officially no longer be a renter. This is exactly what being a grown-up means to me: large checks and dressing like a preschooler, and I kind of love it.

* That's not strictly true, I do still have a baby hat I got at a 100-yen shop in Tokyo, but it barely covers my ears (I have a small head, but it's not infant-sized) and is too thin to be very warm.
** Being able to choose one's own meals is another thing about being a grown-up that hasn't gotten old for me. I get just as much enjoyment from consciously choosing healthy foods as unhealthy ones, just in different flavors.

Photos from Halong Bay

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:48:34 GMT

Halong Bay Afternoon
Originally uploaded by Little Ayun.

Halong Bay is a strange sight: Open water with no real land in sight, just nearly 2,000 limestone karsts, some big enough to be called islands, some just large enough to make trouble for boats, jutting out of the sea. We had some sunlight while I was there, but more often it's hazy and on the grey side, keeping things that much more surreal.

The drive there takes about 4 hours from Hanoi, and along the way I saw some of the postcard images I'd been dismissing as too contrived back in Hanoi: croplands tended manually, by workers in conical hats, motor-less fishing boats with nets stretched above deck-top shade shelters, and, most arrestingly, a motorbike headed to market, laden down with a cargo of live pigs.

Photos from Hanoi

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:29:06 GMT

Hanoi Street
Originally uploaded by Little Ayun.

Hanoi was the first Vietnamese city I saw in daylight. I'd heard, while researching the trip and trolling various SEA travel message boards, that Vietnam isn't an overly-friendly place, and northerners in particular are rather cold and brusque. Most of these descriptions had a rather critical tone, but part of what I like about cities is anonymity and freedom to slip through places un-noticed, or, at least, unacknowledged. Hanoi is the sort of place where you can be ignored, if you are interested in being ignored, and being polite means maintaining the fiction that we are not constantly intruding on each other. Boston's a little like that, which makes me wonder if there's a message board somewhere full of globe-trotting Asians tut-tutting over the refusal of New Englanders to sustain eye contact or greet a customer entering a store with sufficient enthusiasm.

I didn't find Hanoi off-putting at all, and appreciated the chance to make all the usual first-days-in-a-new-country mistakes without feeling like everyone around me was rushing to help me resolve them.

Back to Everyday Life

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:21:16 GMT

While in Saigon, I stayed with a friend from high school who has been living in Vietnam for the last two years, fundraising for a NGO and living the expat lifestyle. It was fun to see her, to catch up, and hear all her stories of run-ins with Vietnamese bureaucracy and arbitrary weirdness around foreigners,* and to get a look at a more wealthy and cosmopolitan version of local life. (I even ate a non-Vietnamese meal with her. We were both departing for the States early Monday morning, me for home, her for a visit over the holidays, so celebrated Sunday night with a rather fancy dinner at a French restaurant located in a former opium refinery.) Wealthier cities in any part of the world instinctively feel like home to me - if there are big modern buildings, tons of bustle, and enough fancy hotels downtown, I feel at ease, even if I don't speak the local language or know my way around very well, and Saigon is more-or-less on that level. There are local idiosyncrasies, of course: Traffic composition and behavior, the setup of a typical bathroom,** and what to expect from a cup of coffee, but really, cities are cities, and I find them more alike than not once a certain standard of living for the average resident has been reached.

All that is to say that I felt quite immediately and thoroughly at home in Saigon, and when Van read me a posting a friend made about a quite high-paying local job with a tour company for a native English speaker, I felt a shockingly powerful tug. But it was brief, and I'm glad to be back. I was met at the airport (Andy has been experimenting with facial hair while I've been away) and whisked home, where there was pizza waiting for me. First time I'd eaten cheese in three weeks. I missed cheese. And shower curtains. And today I'm back at work, plowing through an overstuffed inbox and drinking coffee the way Americans do. Glancing around my cube, the only evidence I've been away is this new hoodie I'm wearing, with a pig dressed in a devil costume screen-printed on it. You can tell it's not a Western product not just from the weird-ass cartoon animal on it (named Leo, by the way) but by the fact that it's a size large, and pretty close fitting on me.

* She's Vietnamese, born in the US to parents who left Saigon on one of those helicopters something like two days before the city finally fell. While not strictly a Third Culture Kid, she's definitely Vietnamese-American, with an emphasis that shifts between those two depending on the context. In Vietnam, she likes to emphasize her foreignness to explain her lack of fluency (she has conversational Vietnamese, but she learned it as an adult, not a kid) but the first thing she said when she saw me, before I even got a hello, was "So skinny!" in that disapproving Asian way, and she was constantly interrogating me about what I paid for various things. We ate one night at a local restaurant in her (very Vietnamese) neighborhood, and a little kid at the table behind us glanced at the (massive) stack of shopping bags on the chair next to me, then said to her "American, right?" in Vietnamese. As in: "She's American, but you are not, so let's commiserate a bit about how jackassy they are." The kid basically ignored me during this exchange, and later when we made eye contact, it was only so she could give me a shockingly dirty look. I didn't mind. The stack of shopping bags was rather obscene.
** I should apologize now, formally, to every Vietnamese toilet I accidentally flushed toilet paper through. I'm usually better at remembering why the little waste basket is there...

Sounds From Vietnam

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:55:25 GMT

Wheels rolling over wooden boards in the streets of Hoi An, laid down to provide some traction on wet streets, sound like distant fireworks.
Moto horns are quieter, almost friendly, with a sort of "Hey, I'm here!" tone to them. Taxis are somewhat louder, more insistent. A bus is loudest of all, especially on higher-speed roads outside of major cities where everyone has to move slowly. A bus uses its horn most insistently when it is overtaking another vehicle by merging into the lane belonging to oncoming traffic.
Very early in the morning, there are still moto horns, but they are less frequent, and mixed with roosters doing their thing.*
Running water, in a million different contexts. Sometimes it is the sound of a river running. Sometimes it is the sound of rain falling into puddles swollen from the last cloudburst. Sometimes it is rainwater sliding off angled canopies made of plastic canvas that cover market stalls, after the rain stops.
Stacked ceramic bowls jostling against each other in a packed-up street kitchen headed out for business in the morning, or back home again at the end of the day.
Hand tools hitting brick, also in Hoi An, which is perpetually under construction and needing repair from flood damage.
Birds tweet from bamboo cages hanging on the second-story balconies of homes and above businesses and once, in Hanoi, a street sign.
People slurping noodles from bowls of pho at crowded tables.
In the middle of the night on a boat in Halong Bay, the loose wooden shutter of my window bangs with no rhythm as the boat drifts at anchor.

* Is 'crow' the word for it? I found that thread while googling to find out. I'm such a city kid.

A Couple of Minor Events

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:47:45 GMT

My Special Journal Pen exploded somewhere in the Hue citadel yesterday, so when I found a shop selling stationery in a little mall near the market where I had last night's street meat binge, I bought a new Special Journal Pen. It cost 2,700 dong, which is about 15 cents, but instead of change for my 3,000, I got a piece of chewy taro candy and a smile instead. Okay! I've seen 500 dong notes, but I don't think they're being made anymore, and never anything smaller.

The trip to Halong Bay included all meals, and they took me seriously when I requested seafood and vegetarian meals only, serving me endless dishes involving tiny molded gluten shrimp (they even had little gluten leg stubs) and a parade of shellfish. Shrimp is served at every meal, with heads and whatnot still in place. It might have been the water puppet show in Hanoi that put the idea in my head, but shrimp heads seem like they were made to be turned into finger puppets. After a couple of beers, inevitably, they were. Being by myself, I was shuffled from table to table every night to eat with a different set of people. The most enthusiastic puppeteers were a couple from Liverpool on their honeymoon.

I think that people wear face masks here both to keep from spreading illness and to keep from inhaling too much of whatever's in the air. Many people on motorbikes cover their mouths and noses while riding, and after blowing some pretty spectacular black boogers out of my nose in Hanoi, I can kind of see the point. Masks for little kids are cuted up; I saw a small boy running around the domestic terminal at the Saigon airport wearing one that had a puppy's face embroidered on it, and two floppy ears sewn at the sides.

Things I Have Done In Vietnam That I Have Never Done Before:
Watched the first Christopher Reeves Superman movie. It's pretty good!

Some Quick Observations

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:54:12 GMT

In Morocco, you could buy leather babouches in the souks stamped with the Louis Vuitton logo pattern, in the traditional browns or fancy multicolor Murakami version. You could also get them in the Burberry plaid colors. In Hanoi, the fake Vuitton is in the form of custom covers for moto seats, and the fake Burberry is visored helmets with strips of plaid running front to back.

My favorite street treats so far are the little sugared donuts on a stick and tiny bags of rambutan purchased from ladies who want me to shoulder their baskets for a picture. I always pass on the picture, but take them up on some fruit. I haunted a sugar cane press for a few minutes yesterday at a night market, hoping someone would come by to turn the thing on and give me a drink, but no luck.

The older women exercising near Hoan Kiem lake early in the morning are fond of a stripper-quality hip swivel motion, repeated maybe a dozen times in each direction. Both genders slap their limbs with open hands, presumably to encourage good circulation.

I Have An Airport Crush on HKG

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:47:21 GMT

From Hong Kong en route:

Tranfered in San Francisco to get here. That airport is old hat - been through there four times this year alone - but Hong Kong is new to me, and I kind of love it.

Mostly because here it is emphatically not the busiest travel day of the year, the way it was at Logan this morning. I rode to the airport in a half-hour-late shuttle van with two criminally entitled and chatty Harvard 1Ls ("Did you know at the Harvard/Yale game they yell 'Safety school! Safety school!'? Isn't that funny?" "They said at OCS that it's obvious I really want to be a politician from my resume, and I was like 'Well, yeah.'") and two (thankfully) mute MIT folks who, when the shuttle arrive (again, half an hour late) said to the driver "We'll be ready in five minutes." It was more like ten, and at one point during the wait, one of the dipshit 1Ls said to the other "Are we in Cambridge?" Because we were the last two people in the van, both headed to United gates, Dipshit #1 wanted to be friends. He did not get his wish. The airport, of course, was total amateur hour, from the dum-dums in front of me in the check-in line who hadn't heard that checking luggage costs money now and were totally outraged, to the woman in the security line who wondered if she had to take her keys out of her coat pocket before she put it through the x-ray machine.

SFO was a breeze, since I was headed straight for the International terminal, but it was still crowded and hectic. HKG, though? Downright subdued, and the noodle shops give you half an hour of free internet access if you buy something. Plus: a MUJI shop, and little realistic miniature meal magnets like the ones you can get in Tokyo. Signs above the drinking fountain suggest that if you have "acute respiratory sickness" to take a pass on using them, and if you want, you can pay a little money and take a goddamn shower. In line to board my flight for Ho Chi Minh City, I meet a guy from Denver who knows the owner of the place my parents take me to get pho when I visit them in Boulder. See: Hong Kong wins!

Placeholder

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:35:20 GMT

I'm really happy right now. Not right now, like this single moment, I mean, you know, generally. I have sentences half-written about the specifics: random thoughts related to unseasonably warm weather, a big trip coming up, writing on the last few pages of a notebook that was blank a few months ago, a particularly good issue of the New Yorker, or the tiny stings of nostalgia provoked by a line or two in a facebook feed. But they're the surface, and though they would always be things that are good, they aren't things that would make me happy if I was sad.

So, happy. I should make note of it because I know right now I'm intensely grateful to feel this way, and I might forget. I don't want to forget.

Preoccupation: Occupation

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:42:27 GMT

The term that tends to be used at work is "heads down."

The image this evokes for me is elementary school classrooms, late in the school year when there's more time for games, and the refrain: "Heads down, thumbs up!" At this declaration, you dutifully put your head down, ostentatiously hiding your eyes with one arm and ostentatiously thumping a thumbs-up fist on the corner of your desk. Then you wait, listening for footsteps, waiting for the feel of someone else's hand covering yours, pressing your thumb down, marking you as chosen. When you open your eyes, you pick. Who touched you? Your best friend, the obvious person? Sometimes. Somebody being sneaky, marking a person they'd otherwise ignore? It happened. I remember being bad at guessing, too overwhelmed by the possible strategies at play and too often second-guessing myself out of the right choice. When I made it to the front of the room, given the ability to choose others, I was better, predictably choosing neither my closest allies or worst enemies and rarely giving anything away with eye contact or the twitch of a smile when it was time for my chosen player to guess who blessed her.

At work it doesn't mean covering each other's hands in gestures of friendship or playfulness or trickery. It doesn't mean late spring leisure and turning to the last few pages of a textbook. It doesn't mean play, it means work, and I've been alarmingly heads down lately. Working-on-the-weekends heads down, hard-to-leave-the-office-at-night heads down, uninterested-in-subtitled-movies-at-night heads down. So heads down, in fact, that I can't get away with my lifelong strategy of crisis-making procrastination-as-motivation. Not so much a matter of volume as effort: Too many things to think about, so many in fact that I eagerly offered yesterday to help out an admin with some meeting invites just to spend some time on a simple task. It's strange, and I hope it lasts, because the best thing about doing something hard is feeling yourself get stronger. Next week is my second go-round with a periodic week-long intensive meeting in Indianapolis. Last time it was exhausting and confusing, and I expect it to be so again. But last time I struggled to keep notes in the daily breakout sessions, and this time I'm leading them.

Which is to say: Not much time, or energy, frankly, for writing. But I hope you'll forgive my heads down-ness and wish me luck next week anyway.

It's Funny Because It's Sad

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:07:56 GMT

The awful thing about this (humor) piece in which Bill Maher suggests that offering the gay civil rights agenda as a distraction-cum-sacrificial scapegoat to the WE WANT SOMETHING TO BE OUTRAGED OVER faction of the right wing is that he's totally right when he says it would work like a goddamn charm.

Unrelated: Can I just walk into my bank's branch and say "I want to do a wire transfer!" and probably give them some money, probably too much, and all the bank info for the receiving bank and actually have it happen? Or do I have to go to that scuzzy check-cashing place and try to figure out how Western Union works? Need to send some money to Vietnam, and although they'll kindly allow me to fax them every bit of identifying information about myself, plus photocopies of a credit card (both sides!) to them, I'd rather not, thanks. And not just because I never actually learned how to use a fax machine.

Central Square Quiz Bowl

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:36:49 GMT

Who do I hate the most?
(A) Homeless Panhandling Guy outside 7-11 who yelled "Nigger!" at a passing guy and asked me if I wanted to "make love" as I walked into the sub place.
(B) Fratty Guy angrily threatening to "fucking kill" Homeless Panhandling Guy for what appeared to be no good reason as I left the sub place.
(C) Woman walking behind me all the way home from the sub place, explaining to someone over a cell phone how hard it was to find a place to study on a Sunday night and fast at the same time, and how the fast was absolutely necessary in order to get her diet back on track.

I Have A New Favorite Sport

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:58:16 GMT

About to Bite It
Originally uploaded by Little Ayun.

One of the highlights of the trip Andy and I took to Tacoma over the weekend was a round of Mutton Bustin' at the Puyallup Fair. Little kids ride freaked-out sheep, and try to hang on for six seconds. Most don't make it. There are lots of tears, and some blood. I had been looking forward to seeing this insanity ever since I read about it maybe a month and a half ago on the Fair's website. I was not disappointed.

Very Serious Business

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:29:52 GMT

Please recommend some travel reading for me. This might be a bit difficult.

I'm looking for suggestions of long literary-ish novels or very narrative nonfiction that are highly readable, either for galloping plots or uncomplicated prose. Books that I won't be embarrassed to carry that will make long flights on restless sleep more enjoyable. Something that's unputdownable but not such a quick read I'll be done with it so soon I'll worry about having nothing left to read. Some reading will be done on a beach, some in character-free business class hotel rooms, lots on various forms of transit including but not limited to long flights and overnight trains.

Things I've already read that fit the bill include:
Freddy and Fredericka and A Soldier of the Great War Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale is coming with me to Vietham)
Most John Irving novels. I'd go back to this well, but I've read all of the long ones already.
The Historian Elizabeth Kostova (the 'literary potboiler' micro-genre has been particularly good to me).
Devil in the White City Erik Larson
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2666 by Roberto Bolano would probably be on this list if I had finished it, or on my packing list if I hadn't gotten so far into it before needing to return it to the library.
Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane have become my go-to choices when I'm looking lowbrow, which should indicate where my floor is. Richard Price might make it into that gang, but I sort of hated Ladies Man, the one book of his I read.

A number of the books on the Modern Library 100 list would have been good choices as well - The Magnificent Ambersons and Deliverance come to mind, and I've got an unread copy of Sister Carrie that I vacillate on. I'm also toying with picking up one of the longer Dickens serials I haven't read - anybody care to weigh in on Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield or Little Dorrit?

Titles I've definitely ruled out inclide Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses. A lot of people seem to love Murakami and Neal Stephenson, but I'm not one of them. I dislike most fantasy, and the majority of science fiction. Somewhat more friendly to crime/thriller/mystery stories, but the ones I like tend to be shelved with fiction rather than in the genre ghetto.

Suggestions from people familiar with my reading habits will be particularly appreciated. Bonus points if mass market editions exist, or super-cheap used or remaindered copies are easy to find.

I apologize in advance for having such fussy taste.

Credit Where It's Due (Again)

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:38:43 GMT

Several drivers were downright gracious to me on my bike ride home tonight. I shared a moment with one when an obviously-troubled woman jogging the wrong way in the street on Berkeley repeated "I AM PISSED" as she ignored a red light and wove between cars. We agreed that if she was no more than pissed, she probably got off lucky. Three others paused for me at intersections or held off on making turns across my lane to wave me forward. It's almost like people read all of those recent deliberate provocations about bikes versus cars in the Globe and decided to react by being nicer. More likely it's because the recent humidity seems to have broken a little.

And I've been meaning for a while to apologize for talking shit about Jim Webb. I've watched his Senate career off and on, for no real reason other than I think he's sort of interesting as a human, rather than a Senator. He's been pretty faithful to his publicly stated positions, and particularly principled in his support of working class and poor people. He has not proven to be a pseudo-Democrat, and I totally take that part back. The weird sexual metaphor talk about national monuments thing is still...weird, but he's also got a spotless voting record on reproductive rights (NARAL gives him a 100! National Right to Life gives him a 0!) which probably should count more in the long run. So, golf clap to ya, Jim. My boss votes in VA now, and I will totally tell him that you have my endorsement. My endorsement is worth a lot!

I'm A Little Bit Like Her

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:53:18 GMT

I've told this story like three times since it happened, and I'm not telling it right, because the moral or the punchline or whatever you want to call it is "I love my grandma so much," and I haven't figured a way to make sense of it for anyone who doesn't know my grandma. Still, just like the strawberries a few years back, it's a memory I'll keep and revisit and laugh over and share again and again.

Friday, after a long day of travel-and-waiting-for-travel for me, my mom volunteered the two of us to cook dinner that night. It started as a team project, but ended up being my recipe* and my directions for prep, which was split between me and mom, and, basically, my show, augmented by some carry-out ribs from the local grocery store's BBQ tent. Though grandkids are expected, indeed obligated to help out in the kitchen, there's a general unspoken rule that we take the low-stakes, low-visibility work. Side dishes. Salads. Table-setting and cleanup. This may not be by design, but it seems like it. It ensures the grandkids get the everybody-helps-around-here lesson without getting exposed to much of my grandmother's territorial sniping. The kitchen is hers, and though she insists she doesn't want to cook at all anymore, she'll still defend her turf and watches things closely enough to give me a bit of performance anxiety over things like grilled cheese sandwiches. I went looking for soy sauce, unsuccessfully, at one point, and didn't fail to catch the triumphant note in her fridge-door rattling before she handed me a bottle I'd failed to find on my own. This is all, in the final calculus, part of what I find endearing about her. 'Cause I do. I love my grandma so much.

So my mom and I are prepping bunches of chard to cook up in garlic and butter and toss with pasta and goat cheese for dinner. It's one of the very few recipes I've got memorized, and the first thing that came to mind in the grocery store when my mom suggested we do the cooking that night. I'm directing mom to stem the leaves and chop them, and grandma hovers, pointing out that the stems don't have to be thrown away,** that they can be cooked too, they just have to go into the pan before the leaves. Mom waves her off, saying that we're doing things the way I say, because this is my recipe, this is my dinner. This was, in retrospect, probably a miscalculation. I faced the microwave, focused on my chopping, while this exchange took place, and then heard, in a dark tone, "Well. I'm not going to learn anything from her." and the by-then-familiar sound of her light footsteps and rubber-tipped cane as she left the room. Though sometimes I'll give it back to her a bit, I didn't bother this time. First, she's not doing so well these days - it feels a little unkind to mouth off and that didn't used to be true. But second, and more important, she was right. I'd only ever cooked chard this one way, for this one recipe, which I got from a newspaper and followed blindly. I can do a lot of stuff she can't, I've seen a lot of places she won't, but I won't ever teach her a thing about cooking. I love that. I love her. Her analysis of the final dish: Not enough garlic, can't taste the goat cheese. The pasta is cooked perfectly. My mom cooked the pasta. I love my grandma so much, and I'm sort of sad today that I'll probably never be able to cook something exactly the way she would have done it. But the next time I make that recipe, I'll chop up the stems and toss them in to cook before the leaves, and I'll think about my grandmother, who you have to hug carefully now.

Mom told me that their newest home aide doesn't know her way around a kitchen, so she lets my grandmother stand in the kitchen and direct her every move. If this is the truth, if the woman is indeed totally unable to cook, and not just performing a dance with my grandmother, it's as elegant an arrangement as evolution. If it is a dance, it's a work of art.

* By which I mean I found the recipe. I didn't invent the dish or anything.
** She was, of course, a Depression kid. Throughout the weekend my mom works hard to convince her to toss less-than-fresh food and we conspire in whispers over throwing out maybe half a cup of leftover ground beef.

Lunchtime Miscellany

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:36:21 GMT

On the steps of the Boston Public Library, a girl stands with her friends, talking. She's eating a roma tomato whole, taking bites out of it the way you would an apple and I watch her, wondering why I've never tried that. She takes a bite and I hold my breath, waiting for the inevitable mess, but it doesn't happen. She goes back to talking with her friends, and I walk around them to get inside the library.

Two conversations in the library:
A very polite guard very politely explains to a very impolite possibly-intoxicated man about indoor voices.
A guy with an accent I can't place asks me where the DVDs are.

Dear dreadlocked shirtless guy riding a bike on the sidewalk too fast and braking to take the corner by dragging heels on pavement rather than using the damn brakes on the damn bicycle while making absolutely no effort to avoid people who are walking in the place where walking is supposed to happen,
YOU ARE THE BIGGEST DOUCHE ALIVE AND YOU ARE GODDAMN LUCKY I DIDN'T CLOTHESLINE YOU BECAUSE I AM IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD THIS WEEK.
Love,
ann

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:39:27 GMT

I.
From half a mile away
In Central Square
Where police still hang
After headquarters moved
Because they are called here eventually
And they like that Italian place I go to.

II.
The unused tricycle.
And the occupied holding cell.

III.
If he really said
"I'll speak to you your momma outside,"
That would be the best part.

IV.
On top of a hill called "Class"
Looking at another hill called "Race"
Or the other way around.
It is hard to tell which hill is higher.

V.
Chapter 272, Section 53
Once applied
To "rogues and vagabonds."
It now merely threatens
"Common railers and brawlers."

VI.
Everyone should be afraid of the police.
Even though no one should have to.

VII.
Amy lived on Ware St.
She sat in my living room
Describing how well Skip dresses
How he smiles at strangers.
That southern thing.

VIII.
Andy had never heard of Gates.
But knows one of the cops
Who showed up in a news photo.

IX.
A Cambridge cop once yelled
Because I came too close
To an exploded manhole.
Then, deferentially,
"I'm sorry. I don't want you to get hurt."

X.
Melissa Harris Lacewell
thought you should know
#SkipGates...likes white folks.

XI.
If you yell at a cop in my part of Cambridge
It is usually okay.
As long as you are homeless
And intoxicated.
Or crazy.

XII.
Malcolm X. asked
What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?
In Cambridge, you call him a rock star.
Some people do, anyway.

XIII.
I too have had
Just-got-back-from-Asia jet lag.
It makes you crazy.

With all due apologies.

Building New Circuits

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:49:56 GMT

I'm pretty good at mental arithematic: quick sums, figuring tips, dividing up a tab, converting city blocks to miles, that sort of thing. Last year I finally memorized the formula for converting between fahrenheit and celsius temperatures, and now I do it semi-consciously and always scrupulously (multiply by 1.8, not 2 - that's lazy). This is particularly useful when I'm in another country, mentally converting prices back to dollars dozens of times a day. I usually land in a place already comfortable with the dollars:whatever ratio thanks to months of sporadic xe.com checks and message board posts quoting prices in local currency. It matters to me that I be able to do this - translate numbers back to a scale that's familiar to me, and I've never spent long enough somewhere else to be able to think in a new price, even as I start, after only a day or two, to internalize a few words in a new language or learn how to match foot traffic patterns or use a new subway system. Moreover, it matters that I do it precisely. The last few trips I've taken have involved 1, 2, and 3-digit values in local currency that lined up roughly with one dollar. Make the local currency-to-dollars, then figure a quick 15 or 20 % to add or subtract to get at the final number. I have to do this, it makes me uncomfortable not to.

Vietnam's* currency, jockeying for the last couple of years with Zimbabwe's for the least-valued in the world, is currently hovering at around 17,800:1 versus the US dollar. My awesome mental math skills aren't so hot when you get up to 5 and 6 digit calculations, and I've kept butting my head against the difficulty of the dollars-to-dong conversion, which involves the kind of multiplication that I really need to write down. 1 dollar is 17,800 dong, right, so what's 3 dollars in dong? 53,400! I can do that in my head, but it takes a few seconds, and the problem gets worse as the numbers get bigger. Shorthanding it? Rounding up all the way to 20,000 dong:dollar. Can't do it. In Marrakech every time I paid 1 dirhan for a macaroon from one of the ladies in Djemaa el Fna, I thought that's eleven cents. Not ten, eleven. Those were such excellent macaroons. Anyway.

Haggling is apparently common in Vietnam, so I won't often be able to look at a price tag and do some quick figuring. Worth keeping in mind as well are people who might take advantage of a foreigner's confusion over costs quoted in large numbers and currency involving lots of zeroes. 1, 10 and 100 look very different to me as numbers. I have to look a little longer at 10,000 and 100,000, and that fraction of a second is going to be enough to throw me off.

What I didn't realize until today, though, is that the mental math I'll be doing on the ground is in the opposite direction - dividing large numbers in dong into smaller numbers in dollars. That's the peg, and I didn't even realize it until I saw a table that helpfully noted the dollar value of 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000 dong. Somehow that's didn't register when I saw the tiny backwards calculations at the bottom of dollar:dong currency quotes and saw figures like "0.00005 dollars." It just made me a little more flustered - decimals aren't quite in my wheelhouse. There's a whole going-up-to-the-chalkboard-in-elementary-school aspect to all of this, obviously, that helps explain why I'm actually better at calculating the tip when I've been drinking. Of course, when I figure the tip after drinking I tend to do it out loud, and that always comes off a little Rain Man. ("Seventy-four dollars, seven forty, fourteen eighty for twenty, three fifty, three seventy ten-no, eleven...ten. That's fifteen. Two twenty five each for five. At least two twenty five. At least.")

So, Vietnamese dong. I will figure your shit out. Luckily I have four months to do it. Maybe by then I'll have gotten the tones down right to also say all those numbers in Vietnamese, too. It could happen.

* I'M GOING TO VIETNAM, YOU GUYS. I bet I'll be able to find a bike for rent there that's short enough for me. Maybe.

Dear Meghan McCain: The Legend Continues

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:42:54 GMT

Hey, Meghan, could you make up your goddamn mind?

"'Homophobia is the last socially accepted prejudice,' McCain says, repeating it for emphasis."

I'm sure Sonia Sotomayor totally agrees with you.

The Ugly American Redux

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:51:55 GMT

I really enjoyed this essay in the New York Times Books section about The Ugly American, not least because it makes some of the same arguments that I did after reading it a few years ago.

What's the Matter with Texas?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:42:09 GMT

This slacktivist post about a possible new head of the Texas Board of Education should be a jaw-dropper, but it kind of isn't, at least for me. Rick "If you don't behave, federal government, Texas will take its toys and go home!" Perry is clearly a guy who cares more for grand rhetorical gestures than productive functional governance. Promoting an opt-out homeschooling honest-to-~~god~~-whatever theocrat to make decisions on behalf of all students who aren't lucky enough to have parents willing or able to sit around with them all day doing long division is just the sort of Fuck You gesture I'd expect from him.

And don't think that just because you don't live in Texas or have kids in public schools that this sort of dumbassery won't affect you or your little muffins.

The story reminded me that I'd been meaning to post a republished article about the textbook industry by Tamim Ansary.* It's a few years out of date, but still the best summary I've ever found for the way school publishing works, and the big takeaway from it is that Texas (and, to a lesser extent, California and Florida) is the tail that wags the dog for every school in the nation. The decisions made by the Texas Board of Education quite literally determine what textbooks are going to look like in most classrooms across the country, and Texas, just for example, considers "the importance of patriotism" to be the single most important takeaway from a Social Studies curriculum. [How to] "function in a free enterprise society" is second, and last but probably least is the ability to "appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nations." Digging into the TEKS state standards, the line-by-line ("summarize the major political and cultural developments of the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa;") is less eyebrow-raising, but the high-level goals are no accident. Just for fun, check out what the Health Education standards say about what students need to learn about contraceptives. Hint: It's not "How to use them."

I work in the textbook industry, so none of this is news to me. And I suppose I'm not surprised that the inner workings of relative bureacracies and market segments isn't something a lot of parents spare time for. But man, I wish they did, because Mel and Norma Gabler, who got this whole party started way-back-when, decided what kids would learn in school for pretty much the entire country and I don't think that's right.

* You may recall reading something he wrote in September 2001 about his home, Afghanistan, that is probably more upsetting now than it was almost eight years ago. Ansary totally has a seat reserved for him at my Perfect Imaginary Dinner Party.