And then the next day, it looked like this:

My friends, and friends' friends, are generally pretty considerate of other people's homes. They would've gladly helped clean up after the meal. But with the kitchen sink completely broken, there was really nothing anyone could do that night. So, the morning after Thanksgiving, we had to wake up to this:

And this:

Exactly how I wanted to spend my vacation.
(I don’t care to get too far into it, but the scene can’t be completely understood without mentioning that we also awoke to a blocked toilet. Let’s just say the list of that things I was thankful for that day included a sturdy pair of thick-soled boots and the fact that, contrary to my worst fears, fixing the toilet did NOT actually require sticking my hand in it.)

Perhaps this was my penance for celebrating a holiday with such nationalistic, genocidal roots?

In any case, the sink clearly needed to be fixed before anything else could be done. And there was no hope of getting the landlord to do anything about it that day. So we had to do it ourselves. Which, after a massive team mobilization, got done successfully.
Overall score:

• Sink - 2 (breaking in the thick of food preparations; thwarting any attempts to clean as the evening progressed)
• Us – 2. (managing to cook the meal anyhow; fixing the damned thing in the end)

That seemed like a good point to call it a draw and move on.

***

Over the past few months, I feel like I’ve been reexamining a lot of the negative effects of the years I spent traveling, squatting and generally living in marginal ways. But it’s important for me to remember the benefits too. Living a completely improvised existence for so many years left me with an incredibly eclectic skill set – everything from writing grants to wiring a house with power stolen from streetlights. And I truly am glad that somewhere along the way, I learned my way around Teflon tape and PVC piping.

Getting in touch with my inner plumber

Pie!

Getting in touch with my domestic side. So, so many more pictures to put up tomorrow.

For now, despite the sink exploding this morning, everything's actually enough under control that I'm taking a break from the crowd and hiding out with my computer.

Next up: dinner for 30.

Mt. Shasta, from I-5 in Northern California

It’s been a rare sunny day in Olympia. And cold! Four months of living in the Bay Area has made my blood thin.
On the way up here, I was remembering the only other time I’ve ever been on I-5 between Oakland and Oregon -- tail end of what was probably the most miserable trip of my entire life. I was seventeen, on the West Coast for the first time, hitchhiking south after the WTO protests in Seattle.
My companion and I were both broke, and sick from all the teargas and nerve-gas we’d been exposed to. I remember being cold, throat aflame, and with wet feet for days on end, walking and walking in the rain and finding it nearly impossible to get picked up. In the realm of small miseries, I can think of few worse than waking up in the morning and having to put back on the same wet clothes you were wearing the night before. I think it took 5 days to get from Portland to Oakland (including a disastrous detour on the 101), and I can’t recall ever being happier to make it somewhere.
Doing the same trip in reverse took about 13 hours, including a surreal stop at a casino and the requisite tire blow-out 15 miles before our destination (fortunately, the only roadside emergency I actually know how to deal with). Quite a pleasant trip, all things considered. And I’m happy for a change of scenery.
I still have to spend a few hours working every day to justify leaving town for nearly a week, but the rest of the time is mine to explore, think about food, and spend with old friends.

I've been feeling kind of stressed lately, so I'm trying to remind myself of small things that consistently make me happy no matter how stressed or grumpy I am:

• Photobooth pictures
• Dancing
• Skating
• Swimming
• Mail (paper, though email's not bad either)
• First cup of coffee (and second! The best thing about addictions is that you create problems for yourself that you can then easily solve)

The Personal and the Political

[I seem to have internet access again. Which does more for my mental health than I care to admit.]

I made a decision, somewhat consciously, to keep this blog personal, except for when the political became explicitly personal. Back when I first started posting, this made sense. I had other outlets for passing on news -- including membership in the news collective of a radio station that reaches 25,000+ people.

Anything I thought was important in a general way, I could get on the air or pass on directly through personal networks. Which left this blog as a forum for items not of interest to anyone not specifically interested in me. (Hence the title, a literary reference I assume few people outside my immediate family ever pick up on). I've never made any effort to reach readers beyond my family and friends, and even then I can be pretty cagey. It's never been a secret project, or completely anonymous -- there are quite a few pictures of me on here, and work that has appeared under my name elsewhere -- but I've kept it so it won't pop up if you google me, and I can be pretty stingy about giving out the url.

But lately I've been feeling short of things to say about my day-to-day life. Because, really, I'm in a set routine, and there are only so many times I can complain about schoolwork or people who try to run me over on my bicycle. At the same time, I've lost access to a wider platform for the less personal.

Meanwhile, so many things are going crazy just outside my little academic bubble. I've gotten reports of 7 disappearances in the Philippines in the last week (from sources I don't trust 100% without verification, but the evidence is pretty compelling) . A friend from Madison was beaten and arrested at a demonstration on the US-Mexico border (he's out on bail as of this afternoon, but still faces felony charges and possible deportation to Colombia, even though he grew up in the US and is a legal permanent resident). Not to mention the usual litany of horrors in the world at large.

But somehow, I still find myself trying to get information passed on through other people's websites or news shows rather than posting on my own. This is partly because I know I don't have the time or energy to update this blog consistently enough for it to function as a news source. But it's also partly because I still haven't decided whether this is an appropriate venue for that kind of material. So, I don't know. Thoughts? (and yes, commentophobes, you can call or email)

Go look at my photos...

I'm still working on getting all the tags and dates organized, but I've started putting some of my photos from the last 5 years up on flickr.
Check them out at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19958499@N03/

My most disjointed post ever...

“Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate” –Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, Oct. 22

While I’ve been distracted by other things:

The Glorietta blast has been ruled, officially now, an accident. I'm still not sure what to think. And I also can’t quite help being suspicious about the timing. Though only confirmed in the past days, the initial declaration of this revised assessment came October 24, after an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at Malacanang that also led to a rapprochement between Arroyo and Speaker of the House Jose de Venicia Jr. Convenient, as usual.

I’ve finally taken the plunge and purchased a computer which should, I feel it’s reasonable to hope, work properly. I eagerly await the return of the hyphen, zero, underscore and close parenthesis to my writing.

I’ve been going through a lot of my old {and recent} photographs, and will start putting them up on flickr, though probably not until my new machine has arrived. I will put up a link when it’s available.

Some previews, chosen more at less at random on the theme of “ruined buildings”:

Ruins of Tito’s mansion in Mostar, Bosnia i Herzegovina, 2002 {destroyed by war}

El Forat de la Vergonya, Barcelona, 2003{destroyed by gentrification}

Angel Island

Angel Island. {Clearly} not by me

Fatal Explosion in Manila

An explosion Friday afternoon in a Metro Manila shopping mall left at least 9 dead and more than 100 injured. Investigations into the cause of the explosion are ongoing, but authorities have announced traces of high explosives were found on the scene and fingered the Abu Sayyaf Group as a prime suspect.

I was shocked and upset to read the news. But hardly surprised. At risk of sounding like a wingnut conspiracy theorist, I have to say: the timing of this attack is just way, way too convenient.

The already unpopular President Arroyo recently got busted for distributing sacks full of cash to legislators. These “cash gifts,” ranging in value from about US$4,000 to US$10,000 were distributed at the presidential palace during a meeting of allied politicians, with the fairly transparent goal of buying their loyalty as a new round of impeachment attempts reaches congress.

Unable to deny the incident after a few legislators spoke to the press, the administration’s attempts at damage control have bordered on the ridiculous – claiming that such “cash gifts” are standard rewards for a job well done and therefore nothing scandalous, arguing that the money came from private rather than public funds and is thus not subject to scrutiny, and asserting that President Arroyo was not actually in the room when the “gifts” were handed out and consequently should not be linked to them.

Needless to say, these explanations are a bit unsatisfactory, and quite a lot of people are quite upset by this latest episode in a long, long string of corruption scandals. And this time, the opposition is not only from the left or the middle class, but also from soldiers, who have recently been denied even the pittance of a $3 bonus they should be entitled to for combat pay because of a “lack of funds.”

In short: it’s a perfect time for a public tragedy -- preferably an act of terrorism -- which can rally the troops and the public around the president, and which will justify declaring of a state of emergency, putting the capitol under tight surveillance, banning large public gatherings and pressuring the media.

And look what just happened: an explosion in the heart of Metro Manila, at a shopping mall that caters to middle-class and upwardly mobile urban professionals (a core constituency for the anti-corruption movement).

I really don’t have any idea what happened, but it seems like the situation breaks down like this:

Could it have been the Abu Sayyaf, or a similar group?
Absolutely. There is definitely a precedent for terrorist attacks in Manila by forces in opposition to the state. This is not even the first time Glorietta Mall has been attacked -- in May 2000, a homemade bomb damaged a pedestrian bridge in the complex and injured 12 people. Moreover, the Abu Sayyaf has claimed responsibility for past bombings in Metro Manila, the most fatal a 2004 attack on a ferry in Manila Bay that killed over 100 people, and the most recent in 2005, when a bus in Makati, a mall in GenSan City and a bus station in Davao were attacked simultaneously.

Could the administration be responsible?
Absolutely. The first thing that comes to mind is the Plaza Miranda bombing in August 1971, the apex of several months of attacks all bearing (to quote Alfred McCoy’s “Closer than Brothers”) “the fingerprints of a military operation,” which killed 9 and injured 3 opposition senators at an opposition rally, and provided Marcos with the pretext for suspending the writ of habeas corpus and declaring Martial Law. I’m not saying Arroyo has necessarily reached a Marcos-esque level of depravity, but the hundreds of activists salvaged* on Arroyo’s watch bear profound testimony to this administration’s absolute disregard for human life when making decisions about regime maintenance. Furthermore, when opposition to Arroyo crested in February 2006, a conveniently timed and very ambiguous coup plot was “discovered,” which allowed Arroyo to declare a state of emergency, target opposition and independent media, and crack down on leftist leaders.

Another possibility?
The initial reports of police inspectors on the scene pointed to an explosion triggered by tanks of LP cooking gas in the mall. It was not until several hours later that authorities announced that traces of C4 explosives were found on the scene. Again, it makes perfect sense that conducting forensic work of this sort would take a couple of hours. But I’m unwilling to entirely rule out the possibility that the explosion was a freak accident that is now being cynically manipulated by the government.

I suspect we will never know what actually happened. But I can say, without a shadow of doubt, that regardless of who is responsible and why, this terrible incident has played directly into the hands of the Arroyo administration.

* [n.b.: salvage: Taglish slang for the practice of torturing political opponents to death, then leaving their mutilated corpses in public places to further terrorize the population at large – which is, revealingly, common enough to require its own word]

For footage of the aftermath of the explosion, with commentary in Tagalog, see:
http://www.gmanews.tv/video/13123/Saksi-Bomb-was-cause-of-Glorietta-explosion-–-PNP

The past is a foreign country...

Self-portrait, 1998

I've realized I have a tendancy not only to think of the past as a foreign country, but also to treat my earlier self as a citizen of that country -- a distant friend perhaps, with whom I share a past but not a present.
What a shock, and a needed one, to be reminded that we share the same body, the same brain and the same heart.

Scars

I went to a presentation today about the military crackdown of the recent uprising in Burma. Terrible, and disturbing in and of itself. But I managed, somehow, to sit and look pictures of beatings and corpses. Until one image flashed on the screen and I nearly had a breakdown.
It showed the inside of a monastery raided by the military, with broken glass, upended furniture and a pool of blood on the floor.
It wasn’t, by any means, the most graphic picture in the series. But it triggered ghosts of a trauma I thought I had managed to lay to rest.

It looked so much like images I still carry burned into my retinas that I almost vomited. I wanted to run out, but didn’t trust myself to squeeze out of the crowded room without freaking out worse, so I stayed in my chair and rode it out.
Just over six years ago, when I was 19 years old and living in Barcelona, I went to Genoa to join protests against the G8 summit. The entire experience was incredibly intense. What I remember most, these years later, is the feeling of menace. I’ve been to some fairly dodgy places in my life, but nowhere has compared to the palpable sense of danger I felt from the moment I set foot in the city until the moment I left, speeding out of the city through back roads afraid for my life. The pinnacle for me, or perhaps more accurately the darkest pit, was the raid on the Diaz school on July 21, where people participating in the Genoa Social Forum, including myself, had been staying during the summit.

I reprint below –typos and all-- an email I sent out the afternoon of July 22, 2001, which describes the situation with much more immediacy than anything I could possible write now.

hey. first i want to let everyone know that i am okay(physically at least). so are cj, shira, macia, soren,alessia and everyone from la fabrica. (sorry for thoseof you who don,t know these people, but i don`t have time or energy to write 2.
i dont know if youve heard anything about the raid on the indymedia center and the school across the street here in genoa. theres some pretty good general information about it at www.indymedia.org.
when it happened i was sitting outside in front of the indymedia center, where there were some meetings going on. things had been pretty tense but it was late and i was very tired, and thinking about going to sleep. all of a sudden, somebody shouted police, and we looked up and saw lines and lines of riot police running down the street towards us. for a minute we nearly ran into the school that had been used as a sleeping place for GSF activists, but at the last minute we turned and ran into the indymedia center, just before the gate got shut. we closed the building up, and ran to the windows. i didnt get a good view, but people who were looking said that they saw the police drive a truck through the gate of the school, then run towards the building, screaming and throwing bottles. just after that the police came into the media center. they made all of us sit on the floor next to the wall, and then searched and trashed the building, taking as much legal support and networking databases as they could. the floor where i was was very tense, with the police walking up and down with sticks and yelling in italian, but after a while it relaxed a bit, and nobody got hurt. they kept us there for about 45 minutes without searching or id-ing anybody.
then they left and someone ran into the hall saying really shaken up saying they had massacred the people across the street. we ran out and there were lines and lines of riot police between us and the other building. they starting bringing stretchers into the building. they were going in and out for over an hour. people saw large black bags being carried out as well. it was hard to see much, but i know for sure that i saw one person being carried out on a stretcher still in his sleeping bag, with a bleeding headwound. it was awful. it just kept going on and on and on. and the tension kept mounting with the police as we were all screaming and crying. after they carried all of the stretchers out, and arrested everyone who could walk out, they ran back to their vans and left, leaving the building open.
when they were gone, we went to the building to tru and get peoples things out, and to try to see what had happened. there was blood everywhere, peoples bags dumped out and scattered, doors to anywhere someone could hide smashed open. everywhere it looked like people had been sleeping there were pools of blood. then the journalists came in and starting filming everything and anyone who was crying and it was even worse. i tried to keep focuse on saving peoples personal things, but i had to leave the building for a while after being in a stairwell with a bloody board lying in a huge pool of blood with a handfull of hair next to it. everywhere that in looked like people had been sleeping was covered in blood. there was blood all down the stairways and smeared all over the walls. there was a radiator with a big circle of blood on it and drips on the floor below. and the police left the building open for everyone to see it.
there were some people in the building who managed to get out by climbing onto scaffolding, and some who managed to hide. everyone has said that when the police came in everyone was just running and trying to get away, or asleep.
when the police would come into a room people would lie down on the floor and try not to provoke them, but that the police were obviosely enjoying themselves.
there still hasnt been a full list of everyone arrested and hospitalized released. crusty from petrushka in defenitly in the hospital with a head injury.
im afraid of being in this city, but the people from GSF seem to have abondoned everyone, so im staying to try and help with legal support. ive been really lucky so far and i hope it will last. people have been organizing safe places to sleep for those of us who are staying, so i should be fine.
but please, tell everyone you know about what has happened here. the media is really shutting it out and its really important that people know. anything you can do to try to raise attention (even forwarding this email if neccesary, removing the beginning bits) would be really appreciated by everyone.
take care
izzy

The end of this story is that there was no safe place to sleep in Genoa that night. The list of those arrested and hospitalized did come out that afternoon. 62 people were beaten into the hospital, nearly all of them with head trauma. Almost everyone involved in the demonstrations had fled town, with most of the organizers from the larger NGO’s regrouping in Milan.
My instinct for self-preservation is stronger than this story may suggest – though I did, after all, at least have the sense to run to the building full of journalists when the riot police showed up – but after what I had witnessed, leaving town while people were still in the hospital seemed unconscionable. It came down to just a few of us left in the media center trying to coordinate some sort of local clearinghouse for information and to get the arrestee’s belongings to safe places.
As night fell, though, it became clear that staying in Genoa any longer would’ve been suicidal. We were being tailed by police as we tried to go to a place to sleep. Some signals were made which, according to my Italian friends, were unambiguously death threats. I don’t even remember exactly how we got out of the city, but I remember almost not being able to breathe from fear until we got onto the autostrada towards Torino.
In the immediate aftermath, the degree to which I’d been traumatized was clear. The next day was the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten so drunk I couldn’t take my own shoes off. I was living in a fog I couldn’t crawl out of until I went into the Alps to sit in the forest for a few days. When I visited Torino a few years later, I recognized nothing in the city. I still haven’t been back to Genoa.
But I thought I’ve been able to put the experience behind me. It’s not something I ever talk about. I honestly don’t think I’d even thought about it in years. But I learned today, it still cuts pretty deep, and probably always will.

If the description above isn’t graphic enough, there’s a film at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zYW5riU81o&v3

Music

I listen to classical music so rarely that I sometimes forget how much I love it.
But an afternoon spent trying to drown out background library chatter has reminded me that certain pieces, like Satie's Gymnopedies, can transport me in a way that almost nothing else can.


When I got home this afternoon I was inspired to play my violin, for the first time in longer than I care to admit.
At times, I'm frustrated by the limits my diminished motor skills impose. I simply no longer have the kind of precise muscular control I had when I was 15. I struggle through music I mastered as a teenager, and it's hard to imagine having the drive -- or the time -- for the consistent, disciplined practice it would take to get back up to a reasonable level of proficiency.
It's still a joy, though, just to play. To draw my bow across the strings and hear the bright, clean sharpness of a perfectly-tuned E string, the murky complexity of a minor scale, or the exacting precision of a Bach Minuet.

The eucalyptus grove -- my favorite place on the UC Berkeley campus.
I wish these photos could capture the smell of sunlight hitting the leaves drying on the forest floor.

Oh, I am so bad.
Looks like I'm back to posting about how I don't ever post.
School seems to do this to me.
What can I say? By and large, I find what I'm doing in school interesting. Which is why I'm here. But it doesn't make for great narrative. As in -- I actually spent a fair chunk of my day in a very involved discussion about how to best diagram the fluid and variegated nature of the plural society that existed (according to some, but not all scholars) in the Burma Delta in the early twentieth century.
Actually though, today was a rather more interesting day than usual. I had the opportunity to have lunch with Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam a feminist group based in Malaysia. Apart from offering a very interesting vision of Islam, one that manages to be both iconoclastic and devout, she was a fun person to get to hang out with for a bit. I am planning to write a profile of her for a class assignment, so more on her later.
I also had the chance to attend a screening of Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem by Masako Sakata, a visiting scholar from Japan at the J School. Her husband, an American Vietnam veteran, took ill and died, quite suddenly, at the age of 54. Masako's search for insight into the underlying causes of his death pointed increasingly to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Eventually, her own personal quest to survive his death led Masako to travel throughout Vietnam, meeting Vietnamese villagers who suffer from diseases they believe are caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange, and whose children suffer from horrible birth defects, even 3 generations after the war.
It was a difficult film to watch -- lots of long, lovingly shot cuts of terribly deformed children -- but very moving, especially because Masako's personal journey is so much a part of the story.
Unfortunately, the film is unlikely to get much distribution in the U.S., but keep an eye out for it.
...And now that I've cracked the guilt barrier about posting, perhaps I'll be writing more.

It never gets any easier.
A friend...can I say friend? For someone I once wanted, had, lost? Someone who did terrible harm to people I love?
And I hesitate, because it seems wrong to speak ill of the dead, but worse to speak falsely.
So, I’ll say he never had a chance. He was utterly destroyed by this world. Broken, beautiful, desperate, angry and lost.
I wish I was more surprised, and less heartbroken.
In all honesty, I never thought he’d make it to 25.
26. Suicide.
Words fail – RIP Shane Russell Martin.

walking home, bone tired, the air tastes of rosemary
this city has its own consolations

2 weeks in.

I feel a lot better about school than I did a week ago. My schedule is more or less set, about half my classes are in the Journalism school, and I have keys, computer access, a mailbox, a webpage, and even a locker there now. It’s a good thing I have so much practice at being a squeaky wheel.

There are a lot of things about grad school that still make me uncomfortable. Or, to be more precise, about academic culture, in which so much of what goes on seems to be purely self-referential.
I’ve gone on about this before, but it hasn’t stopped bothering me that there often seems to be a tendency among academics to be completely divorced from reality, to the point of being concerned more about the field than the subject.

I don’t want to think this comes down to a lack of faith in knowledge in the abstract. There is, and I think will always be, part of me that is inspired by any pursuit undertaken out of genuine passion, even if it’s not demonstrably useful. After all, it’s pretty hard to justify art in concrete terms, but I’d hate to live in a world without it. And you could definitely make a case for even the most esoteric study of literature or prehistory as rooted in a desire for insight into the human condition.

But I’m very discouraged by a lot of work and talk that seems to be motivated by one-upmanship, making a name for oneself, and the other petty vices of academic politics. The academy can seem like an airless world, where whatever spark of curiosity students start off with is more easily extinguished than ignited.

It makes me more certain I was right to kick and scream until I got more access to the journalism school. The field of journalism is definitely not innocent of back-stabbing, self-aggrandizement, intellectual laziness and a thousand other crimes great and small. But because of the very nature of the profession, the public, the wider world, is always at the forefront of journalists’ minds.
And people here, so far, do seem to be very concerned not only with trying to explore, understand and explain the world, but also with the impact their work has on society as a whole.
After a few hours discussing what someone said about someone else’s article about pre-modern history, it’s refreshing to go to a class with people who write, or intend to write, about Asia, and be forced to examine how media coverage of non-violent vs. violent protests feeds into social instability.

I’m hoping a balance between the two will keep me sane. And honest.

Q: Who assigns a thousand pages of reading in the first 2 weeks? Excuse me, 994 pages. Wouldn't want to get overdramatic here.
A: One of my history professors, who shall go unnamed. Grad school is awesome.

On the other hand, I will no longer have the pressing problem of what to do with my free time in a city where I still only know a few people.

And it's kind of nice to get back into a familiar routine, even if that routine involves spending a lot of time in the library hating life.

Grad School...

So, I start grad school on Monday. Academically, I don’t expect it to be too big a jump, since I was taking mostly graduate level courses last year. But it still feels like a huge step to be taking, and the past few days haven’t been very reassuring.
I’m in an odd position, because I’m doing a program that almost nobody else has ever done. Both the Asian Studies program and the Journalism school promote their dual degree programs, but neither seems terribly prepared for students to actually enroll in them. Asian studies doesn’t quite know what to do with me, because I’m a journalism student. On top of that, I’m doubly isolated by being a Southeast Asianist in a program that’s dominated by Chinese and Japanese studies. On a more positive note, though, it’s a very small class [4 students this year, the other 3 studying Japan], so we do all have access to a lot of personal attention, and my advisor in the program seems very supportive.
The journalism school, on the other hand, appears to have written me off completely. I won’t start taking their sequence of intensive reporting classes until next year, so apparently, I do not exist to them. Which means, for example, that I was not invited to attend the orientation session and get to know the faculty and other students. I only found out about it because I happened to stop by the school looking for some information, and noticed signs pointing the way to “New student orientation.” Which, by then, was pretty much over. Fantastic. And then I was told that I’m “not really a journalism student yet.” Which was the first I’d heard of this, and a bit of a surprise, considering that one of the major selling points of the dual degree program is that students are supposed to have full access to both departments [which in the case of the J school includes career services, a lot of really nice equipment, and other perks I’ve been eagerly looking forward to] while studying here. So, once again, I find myself having to fight with the administration of the Journalism school before even getting started. A situation, eerily, and unfortunately, reminiscent of Madison. And a great way to get started.
Do other people have to do this? I feel like my entire academic career has been marked by epic battles between me and the administration.
I’m trying to stay positive, though, and look at the school’s disorganization about dual degree programs as an opportunity to design my own course of studies the way I want it.
Provided, of course, that I don’t mind butting heads with bureaucrats at every step of the way.

Visiting the DC area has become an exercise in disorientation rather than nostalgia. Getting off at my old metro stop, there is almost nothing I can recognize. The supermarket down the block from my parents’ old house now has a Starbucks in it.
I spent most of a day walking through the city, barely able to navigate neighborhoods I lived in as a teenager, getting hungrier and hungrier because all of the places where I could think of to eat aren’t there anymore.
Virtually no one that I grew up with lives there now, and of those who do, a (to me) shockingly high percentage of them live with their parents, even if they have “grown up” jobs. The rest have basically become, to their discomfort, the shock troops of gentrification -- living in marginal neighborhoods where they can still afford the rent, finding their presence as young, mostly white, artists and activists makes those neighborhoods more attractive for development, at which point they (along with the rest of the neighborhood) can no longer afford to live there, and have to move somewhere else and start the cycle over.
There’s something a bit sad about realizing that even if I were so inclined, nothing in my near future makes it look economically feasible to settle down where I grew up. I mean, it certainly doesn’t cost more to rent in DC than in the Bay Area, but it’s not like there are interesting old fixer-uppers to buy in reasonable neighborhoods. They’ve all been torn down to build condos and McMansions.
It seems like most of my friends feel this way. That, or they’re from small towns where moving back is impossible, not because of an influx of money that has priced them out of the market, but because as manufacturing and family farms dry up, there is simply nothing to move back to.
I wonder which feels stranger?

Dancing Prisoners

Prisoners in an overcrowded cell, La Trinindad Prison, Benguet


I'm usually pretty well insulated from the latest internet sensations, but given my interest in prisons and prisoners in the Philippines, friends have seen fit to alert me to the youtube phenomenon of the dancing inmates of Cebu jail.
[For those even more clueless than I am: a thousand or so elaborately choreographed inmates dancing to an odd assortment of music from the eighties, most notably Michael Jackson's "Thriller."]
And I really can't decide what to think.
Part of me can't help but love it for being so bizarrely, quintessentially Filipino. In a country where daytime television shows open with routines by groups with names like "Viva Hot Babes" and the "Sex Bomb Dancers" and cabbies unwind after their noon to 4 am shifts by tunelessly moaning along to schmaltzy pop songs at sidewalk eateries cum videoke bars, the sight of a thousand orange jump suited inmates dancing in unison to the Village People makes a certain kind of sense that I suspect it probably wouldn't anywhere else in the world. [I miss my hyphen key]
Not to mention that the lead role in some of the ensembles is danced by a bakla [neither transvestite, transgendered or drag queen quite precisely translates, but you get the picture], in prison and surrounded by a thousand or so inmates, and no one seems to find this the least bit odd.
And then, of course, I'm always in favor of dancing, and of things that help to humanize prisoners in the eyes of the public. And just about anything is better than sitting in a cell all day.
And yet, I suspect there's some back story here that we're not getting. I did a somewhat desultory search [hey, i'm also trying to move, write, establish residency, etc.] and really couldn't figure out if participation was voluntary or compulsory, how many hours of practice people were doing a day, how people were chosen for roles, or really any details at all.
More than anything else though, I'm afraid these videos trivialize the problems of prisons in the Philippines and in the third world in general. [the larger problem of the entire concept of prison systems is too big an issue to tackle right here and now]
It's possible, and I sincerely hope, that the prison in Cebu is an exception. But when I visited prisoners in the Philippines, I was confronted with brutalized, hungry, ill inmates kept in conditions so appalling that thinking about it still shakes me up. A few excerpts from a report I wrote last summer:
The prisoners lack even basic necessities. They are not provided with soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent or other toiletries. Each cell is given food rations, which they are responsible for cooking for themselves. The rations are insufficient and sometimes arrive only every other day. Some of the prisoners report that at times they have nothing to eat but rice and salt.... Overcrowding also increases the physical hardship in the prison. The cells do not have enough beds for all of the prisoners, so some double up and the rest ... sleep on the concrete floor. The cells themselves are exposed to the elements. One wall and the ceiling are just bars facing an open corridor. Benguet province is one on the coldest parts of the Philippines, and in the winter months the temperature can be close to freezing. The prisoners are only allowed to leave their cells once a week for a 15-minute sunbath, which is cancelled if it is raining at the scheduled time. Consequently, colds, flu’s, and fevers are rampant in the prison. Medicine to treat these problems is not easily available.

You get the idea.




torture victims [since released] in La Trinidad


18 year old torture victim [since released]


this little corner was the designated "bed" of the prisoner above.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I really don't have enough information to know whether these dance routines, and the attention they've gotten, are a good thing for the specific prisoners involved in them, I suspect that it's going to make serious debate about prison reforms in the Philippines even more difficult than it already is.

I have mostly been doing things that, while important, don't make for very interesting reading.
I got a new [old] bike yesterday, I sign a lease tomorrow, and will start moving to the East Bay after that. I finally made up my mind and made plans to go out to the East Coast for about a week in August.
Otherwise, I've been trying to explore the city, get a feel for the social scene, catch up on correspondence and generally enjoy having time in which I can do such things without feeling stressed or guilty about unfulfilled obligations.
I've been reading a lot as well. On my desk right now: Andrei Makine's Dreams of my Russian Summers, and Miranda July's No one belongs here more than you, very different books, both of which I've been enjoying.
I thought about putting up a picture of my bike, but decided I'm not feeling like that much of a nerd today. Maybe some time in the next few days, I'll try to take a picture of it somewhere more interesting than the hallway.

At last...

My desk, upon completion of my article on Basilan
Now I just need a place to live...
[Because as nice as this desk is when it's not totally overrun with books and tapes and papers, it's in the wrong city]

Writer's block. A fancy word for procrastination?
I just know that I'm having to rip every single word of the article I'm working on out of me like I'm pulling a tooth.
I often wonder if everybody sometimes hates doing the things they love quite as much as I do.
I spent some time this afternoon biking around, trying to clear my head. I think it's going to be good for me to live in a place where I have easy access to open water. It always makes me feel less nuts. Even in Manila, I would go down to the bay when I felt like I couldn't handle the city any longer. It's still polluted and congested, but if you close your eyes and listen to the water against the rocks, you can almost forget




This is actually probably the most awkward shot I took of the bridge, but the only one that came out reasonably in focus. I'm excited that I'll have access to fancy professional digital slr cameras once the semester starts!

Transcribing, transcribing, transcribing

"If I look at the provisions of the antiterror law, I would not trust even the most upright government with them, much less a government which has actually a very questionable track record with respecting human rights and the civil liberties of its citizens."
Interview with Atty. Ibarra “Barry” Gutierrez, Director of the University of the Philippines Institute of Human Rights, on the new antiterror law in the Philippines. [modeled after...you guessed it...the USA PATRIOT ACT]

"At the very least, there was a certain measure of shame before....The brazenness now is really something else, and that is actually particularly alarming as far as I’m concerned. ... Before, if you raised concerns, at the very least the government would attempt, even on a very shallow surface level, to make some sort of conciliatory gestures. It would not say, ‘well, sue us,’ which is the attitude right now, by many many officials in government."
Gutierrez on impunity under the current administration

"There were human rights abuses before. Illegal arrests, torture, detention. But what is different now under Arroyo is the extent of killings of political activists. In fact, there’s an ugly joke going around that they don’t anymore have to feed them. Because during the Marcos time, and Ramos and other administrations, they would arrest an activist, or torture him at the most. But at least they were alive, they kept them in detention later to be released. But now, they’re not arresting them anymore. They just kill them."
Prof. Ronald Simbulan, UP Diliman, on the rise of human rights abuses under the Arroyo administration.

Some quotes that may not make it into anything else. Just to give an idea of what I'm doing with my time these days.
One of the lovely things about doing research in the Philippines is how generous people are with their time, once you've gone through the rigmarole of getting in touch and establishing some sort of credentials.
Even busy people with titles will sit and talk to you for hours on end.
The thing is though, you've got to transcribe it all later. And trust me, after hours of listen/stop/type/rewind/double check/repeat, dozens of pages, aching wrists and watering eyes, you start to wish for a few thirty second sound bites.

Readapatation

"My street" in Quezon City

Apparently, I am now a real Californian, having slept through my first earthquake last night. I've been horribly jetlagged, wasn't able to fall asleep until around 4 am, and the quake came through around 4:45, so I must have been completely passed out.
I've generally been feeling a bit disoriented since I got back. Somehow, the disruption to my body flying east in always much worse than flying west. I set an alarm for 11 am, and still didn't manage to get up until after 1 pm when someone called and woke me up. And I could fall asleep right now if I let myself.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and felt like a slack jawed yokel. I had a moment of slight panic faced with the selection of thirty different kinds of olive oil. I was only away for three weeks, there are big modern grocery stores in Philippine cities, and I was in the neighborhood coop here, not some fluorescent lit behemoth chain store, so it shouldn't have been such a shock, but it was. Even the best appointed grocery stores in the Philippines, while they may have a wide variety of products, do not have anywhere near the variety of brands. You can buy vegetable oil in a pouch, a small, medium or large bottle. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you can find a bottle of olive oil. But that's the extent of it.
So there I was, standing in front of an entire shelf full of olive oil, utterly at a loss. In the end, I just grabbed the smallest bottle and called it a day.
Complaining aside though, while I'll never dispute the charms of shuffling through a public market with tarp roof 3 inches shorter than me buying deliciously fresh produce off of blankets and carts, it was certainly nice to be able to push a cart around a bright clean store and pull food I've been fantasizing about for weeks off of the shelf.

Arrived in California earlier tonight.
It was actually supposed to be yesterday, but the flight was overbooked, they were offering a free roundtrip ticket between San Francisco and Manila to anyone who could fy out the next day, and I had an extra day on my visa, so...
Looks like I'm going back next summer, maybe even for some vacation time.
I'm a bit too jetlagged to write much more, and using a borrowed computer in someone else's room, so I'll write more later.

Photos from Zamboanga

Blogging as work avoidance.
In any case, here are some photos in the thirty minutes I was able to spend as a tourist in Zamboanga city. Not the best composed, but I was conspicuous enough without waving a camera around all over the place.

Fort Pilar

Rio Hondo Mosque

The very tip of the Zamboanga Peninsula

Near the Zamboanga City port. If this photo were a bit higher resolution, you could see Basilan in the background. It's the second island away.

Homesick. For any home.

I have just 4 days left in the Philippines now. And I have to say, I’m ready for this trip to be over. At the moment, it’s not even so much that I feel like I want to be out of the Philippines, as that I’m totally sick of not having my own space. I haven’t slept in a bed that I could call my own since May. No matter how genial the hosts, it’s always exhausting being a houseguest. And the few nights I’ve spent in hotels haven’t been much better, especially since going out to eat alone is a particularly excruciating experience here. I just want to cook my own food, eat as much or as little as I feel like, go home or go out when I please, shower or wash clothes without asking permission, sleep late or be antisocial and sit in a room with a closed door without feeling the need to justify myself, and the thousand other small comforts of home. I’m not terribly particular about the material conditions I’m living in (though I will confess to a rather embarrassingly first world loathing for Philippine plumbing] but my need to feel like an autonomous person is really strong. Add to that the fact that I can’t go anywhere, anytime, without being under constant scrutiny from the staring throngs, and yeah, San Francisco sounds pretty good.
I’m so, so glad that I sublet a room for July, even though I’ll have been away for more than half of the month, because the thought of another couple of weeks of being a guest makes me want to cry...

Safe and Sound

I imagine the news about what happened in Basilan over the past few days [attacks by rebel groups on the Philippine marines that left at least 14 dead, including at least 9 beheaded] may be trickling in to the Western media.
In case my last post wasn't clear enough, I'm back in Manila, and fine. I did not, in fact, even know about what happened until today. Which is actually pretty bizarre. I was at the Philippine military base yesterday, speaking with a public affairs officer from the US Joint Task Force, including a fair amount of discussion about Basilan, and didn't know what had happened until it came out in the press.
I still don't really understand. I can only assume that the person I was talking to was also unaware at the time, because he said a few things that, in retrospect, look pretty foolish. i.e.:

"And this is where a big part of our involvement with the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines], and our work with the AFP really began was in Basilan where they had significant successes against the Abu Sayyaf and JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] to the point where the US no longer maintains any sort of presence there. They have for most practical purposes...I won’t say that they have eliminated the threat, but they have certainly taken great strides to counter the threat in Basilan."

So, yeah. I didn't watch the news last night, but usually the grapevine is all you need here, and I was out and about until after 8 last night. Didn't here a murmur. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Basilan is just a few miles from where I was, visible over the water.
But in any case, just wanted to reassure that any pondering I'm doing is being done from a nice long distance.

On a much lighter note, my computer is, as usual having some difficulties with the weather, and thus I've lost the use of certain keys. Most irritatingly the zero, the hyphen and the close parenthesis. Thereby depriving me of some of my favorite punctuation.

Photos

Back in Manila. Exhuasted. But happy to be back.


Samal Island, near Davao City, Mindanao

The pictures below are from the 7th anniversary celebration of Davao food not bombs

Mindanaoan Dance
Fire Dancer
Art session for street kids

Would you believe there's a coffeeshop with wifi here? A good place to kill time during the endless waits to get anything done. I've generally found Zamboanga to be frustrating. As everywhere in the Philippines, doing anything requires going through an excrutiating mix of formal and informal procedures. For example, to speak to the US military, I first had to get clearance from the Philippine Military. Of course, theoretically, one could just send a fax ahead of time. But in order for the fax to get read, I had to have someone here to put in a word. So I couldn't even do that until yesterday. This morning, I found out that I have been given permission by the Filipinos. But still no actual contact. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow morning, because I already have appointments set in Manila tomorrow afternoon. Now it looks like I may have to delay leaving here if I want to get a chance to talk with people. Which means choosing between letting this whole trip to Zamboanga be basically a complete waste of very limited time, or breaking other appointments that were not so easy to make either.
Not to mention the fact that I really, really want to leave Zamboanga. It's hard to get around much by myself, and the communication barrier here is pretty high. Unless people are well eduated, they don't even speak Tagalog here. Mostly Chabacano, which is a mix of broken Spanish and Malay, which I can somewhat understand, but can't speak.
Okay, just now finally heard from the Military people. So I'm going to end this here.

Sorry for the communication gap. It's not as easy to stay in touch in Mindanao as it is in Manila.I'm in Zamboanga now, after 5 days in Davao. Everything's been going well so far. I had to wake up kind of distressingly early for my flight, but I'm still mostly functional, was able to pull off an interview with the chief of staff of the local congresswoman. It would have been the congresswoman herself, but she was called away for a meeting with the President. People and their priorities, no?Davao is also a pretty fascinating city. It's basically under a kept under an elightened reign of terror by the Mayor and his death squads. So, it's very safe, very clean, the mayor is open to dialogue or rallies on issues related to the environment or globalization, but one step over the line, and you're likely to end up with a bullet in your head. Especially for drug use, theft, other common crimes -- or criticism of the Mayor,Which most people, naturally are afraid to do. There has been almost no one willing to speak out against him -- one radio host did, survived having his station bombed and his house ambushed, only to die when his long-time card playing buddy was paid to stab him. All rumors of course, because the local press isn't suicidal enough to report on it. (Although the mayor is broadcast every Sunday reading his list of people he's giving a last chance to turn themselves in for rehabilitation, or, basically, be get shot) But everybody knows whats going on, and several people I talked to had witnessed people getting shot or stabbed by the death squads. The going rate, apparently, is a bit less than $100 a head for an assassination, conducted mostly by Rebel returnees or common criminals cut a deal to escape summary execution themselves.
I can write this here, because I know that it's basically just family and friends that read this, but to go into more detail in a more public forum would be a decision never to return to Davao. And I can't document anything, and couldn't without a long time to do slow, deep, careful investigative work.
On the lighter side, I stayed out of trouble, and thus managed to actually have a good time in Davao. It's much less chaotic than Manila -- fewer people over a larger area. Mindanao is one of the few islands in the Philippines that's not highly overpopulated. And has some of the cleanest municipal tap water, which is a nice change. When you get thirsty downtown, instead of having to get bottled, you buy a plastic bag full of water for a peso, rip it open with your teeth, and try to drink it before it spills all over your shirt. I've learned all kinds of new things to do with plastic bags. Eat rice and soup for example. Or, rice and noodles, since you must eat rice with everything here, even if you have another starch.
I was in town for the 7th anniversary of Davao City Food not Bombs, so got to help out with a mass feeding and an art session for street kids. I have a lot of photos, but will probably have to wait until I get back to Manila to post them, as it would take hours with this connection.
Zamboanga City, so far, does not seem as fearsome as its reputation. Part of the problem, I think, is that Zamboanga City is actually quite a bit safer than the surrounding areas, so the media always report from here. Thus, any reports on incidents in Basilan, Maguindanao, Sulu, will be filed with a Zamboanga dateline -- ironically, because it's relatively calm rather than because it's a hotspot of insurgency. In any case, I have hosts here from a local NGO, so nobody's letting me wander off alone into any stupid situations. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to get the US military here to talk to me...

Perhaps...I would be more motivated to post if I was getting a bit more email. Lots of excitement today, but I'm going to make you work for it.

I'm in between appointments right now, was wandering around Quezon City and found a bizarre little internet cafe to kill time in. It's tucked away somewhat improbably on a residential street, and seems to cater primarily to children under 10. Perhaps it's just a function of the time of day. In any case, the internet connection, though slow, is functional, and they're letting me charge up my recorder.
I've been running around pretty much non-stop since I've been here. Two appointments a day may not sound like so much, but trying to get anywhere in Manila is always a bit of an enterprise, so it gets exhuasting quickly.
It's also hard to keep my factions straight. You'd think that the left in this country has enough external problems that infighting would seem like a bad idea, but it seems to be an endlessly popular local passtime. I'm trying to remain as willfully ignorant as possible, but it complicates things. For example, I had an interview with a representative from one organization this morning. It went very well -- he was very friendly and articulate, sat and talked with me for almost an hour and offered to help get me in touch with other people. And yet, when I was leaving, I had to be vague about where I was headed, because I'm going to go talk to another group -- which to me seems very similar in political orientation -- that I do happen to know falls on the other side of a factional split.
To an extent, it's possible to stay out of it as a foreigner, but I do know that it could catch up with me that I've essentially been making contacts through two different networks. Ach, well.
On another front, I finally went to the dentist yesterday. The good news: no cavities. Even the weird hole in my back molar that I was trying vainly to convince myself was just a chipped tooth was, in fact, just a chipped tooth. The bad news: I'm looking at some wisdom tooth extraction in my near future. Again: Ach, well.
I'm in an environment where it's entirely impossible to think. The kids are kicking off. Not to mention reading over my shoulder, staring, etc. So, I think I'm going to give up on this post, try again another time.

Manila

So, this is my mass email style post to let everyone know that I arrived safely in Manila, after a long, hungry, uneventful flight.
(Side notes: Percentage of flights I have requested vegetarian meal for: 100%. Percentage of flights on which I have actually gotten said meal: 0%. On the plus side, they took one look at me towering over everyone else at the check in counter & offered me an exit row seat for extra legroom, which meant that I was actually able to stretch out my legs and get a bit of sleep)
It's crazy to be back here. I'm sleeping in the same room I was in last summer, so everything's simultaneously familiar and alien in my jet-lagged, half-asleep state.
It was funny even getting on the plane in San Francisco. I didn't even have to check where the Philippine Airlines counter was, just followed the hordes of people pushing luggage carts overflowing with Balikbayan boxes. Never fails to amuse me that flights to the Philippines have a higher baggage allowance than to pretty much anywhere else in the world. The airline industry has thrown up its collective hands in defeat.
My flight arrived early (despite PAL inc's reputation as P-lane A-lways L-ate, i-f n-ot c-ancelled) but the ridiculous lines to get through customs more than made up for it. Decided I was too tired to haggle, and took an official airport taxi, paying a premium for an easy life. You get thrown back into the city pretty much immediately upon leaving the airport. Slums, throngs, traffic. The route up to my friend's crosses almost the whole city via EDSA, so I went past little shacks built over the water, the looming, oversized billboards of Makati, the string of military camps in Quezon City, Tagalog coming back to me in fits and starts.
Lots of signs forbidding pissing and throwing rubbish. Lots of rubbish and piss.
And the air. It's hard to describe. Not so much the heat or the humidity, but the absolute filth of it. It just sort of hangs, drapes itself over you like a dirty wet blanket. The rains are late this year.
Does it sound like I hate Manila? Because I don't. I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. I feel like a fraud, an imposter. I would've rather had a few more weeks to recover from being sick, plan out my stay. But I'm here, and a part of me will always love this city, both in spite of and for all of its imperfections.

p.s. I have a cell number now. email for it.

Torpor

I've been approaching my last days in Madison with an air that can only be described as "torpor."
Moving -- especially given my lack of access to a vehicle and ludicrous reluctance to ask anyone for help even though I know they wouldn't mind -- seems to be sucking out what little motivation I have.
Half the time I'm sitting in my apartment asking myself questions like "Will x/y be upset if he/she finds out I've thrown this away?" or "Why do I have so many books? Am I really going to read this ever again or is it just a trophy book? How did I let this happen?" The rest, I've been going out with friends for ambitious ventures like napping on the capitol grounds.
It seems I run at two speeds -- idle and overdrive -- and have a hard time managing anything in between.

In the spirit of trying to post more regularly even though I don't have exciting things to talk about every day:

Noticed the following on the flyleaf of a library book ("Small Island" by Andrea Levy -- not great but not bad):

"....in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life."

Unremarkable, you might think (and believe me, you're glad I cut out the treacle that preceded that). And it would be, except that the book has nothing to do with the American experience. The story is about Jamaican immigrants in post-war London. As in: London, England. There is virtually no mention of America, except for a few brief anecdotes about a Jamaican serviceman's experiences of America and Americans as torn by even more brutal, overt racism than Britain and the British.
So why do the publishers feel the need to do this? Do they have so little respect for American readers of literary fiction as to assume the book won't sell if it isn't labeled as an American story? (I assume the blurb was different in the British editions.) Did they just fail to actually read the book before trying to market it?
I'm expecting some guidance from my readers in the publishing industry...

War on Terror, Reign of Terror

So, the reason I haven't been doing this lately, apart from the usual reasons, is that blogger now requires you to sign up for an account with Google to sign in. I finally did it, just now, and it took about ten seconds, but that proved to be enough of a barrier to keep me away for a few months.
I'm feeling a bit more motivated to try and start posting again, because I'll be finished with school in a week, and, I hope, having a bit more going on, at least for the summer. I'll be heading out to the East Coast for the first few weeks of June, making a brief pit-stop back in Madison, mailing myself and all my belongings out to San Francisco, and then jetting off to the Philippines.
Among other things, I'm hoping to work on a few articles about how U.S. policy on the "War on Terror" is affecting the Philippines. I've spent the past year doing research on the resurgence of human rights abuses under President Arroyo (several human rights groups have said that 2006 was the worst year since the fall of Marcos...and 2007 isn't looking a whole lot better). One of the themes that I keep running into is how the War on Terror facilitates this trend, in a number of ways. It's largely forgotten, but in the early days of the War on Terror, the Southern Philippines, home to alleged Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, was considered one of the prime targets of anti-terror efforts. Throughout, Arroyo has been one of the U.S.'s staunchest allies (despite pulling out of Iraq), ensuring that the Bush administration will block any attempts, within the U.S. or the U.N. to sanction Arroyo for her human right's record. Furthermore, the New People's Army (communist guerillas that have been running an unsuccessful insurgency, concentrated in the North, especially Luzon, since 1969), has been officially listed as a terrorist organization. Essentially, what this has meant is that the United States gives Arroyo unstinting support (politically and financially) to fight terrorism, which Arroyo has been taking advantage of to crack down on the left (legal/reformist and revolutionary) in Central Luzon.
My apologies for all the parentheses.
In any case, it's an interesting (to me at least) aspect of the War on Terror -- the corrosive effects on all countries involved in it. There are also some pretty interesting parallels to the support the United States (even under Jimmy "the Carter Doctrine" Carter) gave to the Marcos regime during the Cold War.
I'm not planning to go to Basilan and get beheaded, but I am hoping to use contacts in the safe areas of Mindanao to get a local perspective on how the conflict is playing out in the South, and also to spend a week or two in Manila and Central Luzon to research the legislative aspects (there's a new anti-terrorism bill) and the social costs of the Philippines' involvement.
Once I get back from the Philippines, I'll have a few weeks to decompress and find a place to live before I start school in Berkeley at the end of August. Perhaps, somewhere in there, I'll take a lesson on how to have a vacation.
I'm excited though.
All I need to do is figure out how to get through two major paper revisions and a ruin-my-weekend 16-page take-home final by the end of next week, and everything'll be great.

The sky was so beautiful this evening that I almost fell flat on my face looking up at it. There was a crazy storm last night -- thunder, lightening and hail -- and it seems to have driven all the dirt and humidity out of the air. The horizon was an absolutely luminous cerulean, fading up to the softest blue-black overhead. The moon was a perfect, delicate crescent, balanced by one bright star, and the clouds on the horizon were a shade of indigo just lighter than the sky above.

I feel like a write about the weather a lot, but it really does dominate my life and my moods, especially here in the extreme Midwest, where it is such a huge, overwhelming force to be reckoned with. It’s too early to hope the weather will stay warm, but I don’t think it will get bitterly cold again, and I feel like a burden has been lifted off of me.

It’s very, very nice to be able to think that this was the last midwestern winter I’ll have to endure – if not forever, at least for a long, long time.

I’ve been pretty stressed out the last few weeks, but all of a sudden, walking outside this evening, I found myself sliding into a warm ooze of calm and well-being. Beyond just the weather, I have finally completed or subdued a couple of projects that were dragging me down. I don’t exactly get a reprieve from schoolwork, but at least for the next few days it’s back down to a level where I can eat, sleep and enjoy myself without feeling like I’ll have to pay for it later. It helps, too, to know for sure that I’ve gotten into grad school, and that all the work and stress has paid off.

I found myself walking down the street, talking a friends ear off, flicking out my fingers and holding out my arms to release energy in a way that I associate with another self, in other, freer, times and places. Realizing that I’d been practically sleepwalking for the last month.

I’m sure it won’t last. It will get cold, gray and rainy again. I have two term papers, a magazine article and a complete revision of my thesis due in the next month and a half. But it’s nice to remember, just for a day or two, that there’s more to life.

Contrition

(me, before the most recent blizzard completely broke my spirit)

Nothing to say. More snow. This is the hardest time of year, when the back of winter has been broken, but it just keeps dragging itself, slowly, along, smearing its mess all over the place.
I was trapped home, alone, most of the weekend by a blizzard that threw itself against my windows, howling like a wounded animal.
I realized Sunday night that I hadn't had any significant face-to-face interactions with another human being in over 36 hours. Not good, so I made more of an effort today, actually sending a text message that included the phrase "desperate for human contact."
To make up for having nothing to report, below is a piece of writing I've been working on for my creative non-fiction class, a brief visit to another time and place:


Flying east from Manila, I lose a night, and arrive the same time I left.
This morning, which was also tomorrow morning, I pulled the gate behind me and stepped into the humid darkness. On an ordinary day, I would be greeted by a chorus of squatter children, bright eyed but toothless like old women. “Hello, Hello, Isabel-po! Where are you going today? What are you doing? When are you coming home?”
Instead, hours before dawn, I find the city eerily still, its chaos muted in the brief pause after nightlife ends and before the markets open. Eyes still sticky with sleep, I marvel at the silence as I brace myself for the long taxi ride to the airport.
Traffic enforcement was abandoned years ago, and EDSA, this vast highway slashed through the heart of the city, is innocent of stoplights, crosswalks or left turn lanes. By dawn, cars, trucks, busses and jeepneys will careen through like pinballs in a chute, horns blaring, yielding to no one; but in the stillness of 4 a.m., traffic flows smoothly, and I can hear the gentle rush of rainwater sluicing beneath the wheels as we pass through Cubao, Mandaluyong, Makati and Pasay.
The airport is harsh, bright and noisy. I submit to a cursory body search and take my place in line, cross-eyed, bent double, bags on my back and around my neck, dragging a cardboard box tied with string. I arrived three months ago with perfectly respectable luggage, and wound up dragging home a used water-filter box full of coffee mugs, unspeakably hideous t-shirts, a handmade cell phone cradle cleverly shaped as a rocking chair -- useless tokens of affection I was powerless to refuse or dispose of.
Approaching the gate, the guards check my bag one last time. No water, toothpaste or fingernail scissors – just tape recordings, reams of paper wrapped for me with infinite care, and photographs of thin faces, tattooed with suffering and unbearably young, looking straight into the camera from behind bars.
This country tears my heart out. The great, green, cloud-wrapped mountains of the north and the shantytowns of Manila, mazes of shacks over brackish water. People, children, staggering under the weight of hope or despair. The rain and the sea and the small boats on open water, held together with zip-ties and bright blue paint.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said again and again. An easy thing to say when I have a government grant and a return ticket to a country where drinking tap water doesn’t feel like Russian roulette and I will probably never have to worry about being swept out to sea through an open manhole. I can’t help feeling like I’m abandoning a sinking ship, waving politely as I unfurl my own private lifeboat.
My last impression of the Philippines is the same as my first – the damp, vegetal air seeping into the gangway, so thick I can feel it on my teeth and my hair.
On the airplane, it’s already a new world, cool and quiet and clean. We cross the international dateline, chasing the pink of dusk, long cloud shadows on the sea as we head into darkness, hurtling towards yesterday morning.