I can't really write about this yet--my experience has been so fractured. A few words to reassure and describe the post-tsunami Sri Lanka, and me in it.
At the time of the tsunami, I was at home in Kandy, in the mountains, with my mother and aunt Steph, whom I had just collected from the airport the day before (Saturday). I received some text messages that morning from various friends saying that there had been a tidal wave in the South. As the day wore on, I got more and more reports from drivers, people in the streets, etc. It wasn't until that night that we got online and found out the extent of what had happened.
On Monday we three left Kandy for a brief trip around the mountains, as I had planned before their arrival. Actually the trip was to continue on through several beach towns. Those towns aren't there anymore; many of the people I know in those towns are missing or unaccounted for. It's been hard to get information; who do you call about a guy you know who works in a beachfront shack? Especially when the cell networks are overloaded and the landlines have been destroyed. Luckily for me, all my close friends are safe; my extended friend group has suffered casualties already.
During our trip I swung between willful ignorance (no, I don't want to read the paper) and gnawing grief (leave me the hell alone). I don't know that my mom and Steph had a fabulous time but they seemed to be enjoying themselves; I held myself apart and wondered why I was having such awful mood swings. Finally we've returned to Kandy and I feel like I can, for better or worse, throw myself into relief work. Am heading to Colombo tomorrow afternoon to work with Sarvodaya, a Gandhian/Buddhist/community development NGO.
Even now, the full damage hasn't been reckoned. It seems like each time I look at a newspaper or a website it's worse. That isn't just melodrama; the worst hit areas are so isolated (both before and as a result of the waves) that the news is literally not known. This country doesn't have the physical infrastructure to deploy all the aid that's come in. Also the government is in such a horrible state that they don't have systems in place to deal with this.
The local governments on the coasts have literally fallen apart in some places: there are no buildings, no offices, no records, no staff. (Many have died or lost family.) The central government is in perpetual disarray and in particular has no specific ministries or wings to manage the crisis. Apparently there is political infighting (as always here) and massive inefficiencies. Sarvodaya is no longer calling for financial aid and instead focusing on getting resources to the people who need them.
I am hoping that with Sinhala and a computer I can do some good. I am afraid that the wholesale destruction of roads, rail lines, and local organizational infrastructure is going to make relief and rebuilding into a morass of want. For those of you looking to help, of course donations to the Red Cross etc are useful--but please also think about writing letters and making calls to keep our (USA) government helping in the long run.
Me personally: well, my research is going on the shelf for the time being; who cares about culture when people are homeless, hungry, dead... I am very grateful for all the emails and calls I've been getting. Anyone who wants to talk, give a ring to 00-94-77-311-5694. The time difference from the East Coast is 11 hours; i.e., when it's noon in Boston, it's 11pm here.
What else is there to say? I am thankful I wasn't there on the beach when the waves came, as I always stay right on the ocean. I am deeply sad, unfathomably so at times, for the losses here. I can hardly begin to imagine the lasting impact of this disaster. I have a lot of survivor's guilt going on right now and a lot of grim hope that I can help in some way. I haven't cried yet.
Best wishes for a better New Year.
12.31.2004
12.14.2004
No, They’re Not Really Hipsters
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people wandering around Sri Lanka who, if you saw them on the streets of New York or Phila, would seem to be dripping with Cool. Their messy hair, their tatty clothes… it’s a study in careful dishevelment.
Except they’re not Cool, they’re poor laborers and betel addicts and alcoholics, by and large. Some phenotypes of this:
-middle-aged guy in tight flowered poly shirt, open to the navel, also wearing a batik skirt (sarong), with shaggy bedhead ‘do
-young guy in short shorts, pink flipflops, big curly Sri-fro, and about twelve necklaces
- the Sri Lankan punk: plaid short-sleeve button-down with plaid sarong
Also notable: the women cops, especially traffic cops, wear tight knee-length skirts and tucked-in shirts and little Gestapo-y shiny caps and belts and lots of insignia. Their uniforms are sort of mauve and they wear matching ankle socks and laced oxfords, making them look like some kind of paramilitary R. Crumb fantasy. Hott!
...I am reading Frantz Fanon, and think he would disapprove of my observations. A colonizer, clearly. His ideas about violence and hatred of the 'native' for the 'settler' are way out of line with my sense of the colonial past and memory here. Then again Sri Lanka didn't have a violent independence movement. No no; they waited till after independence for that!
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people wandering around Sri Lanka who, if you saw them on the streets of New York or Phila, would seem to be dripping with Cool. Their messy hair, their tatty clothes… it’s a study in careful dishevelment.
Except they’re not Cool, they’re poor laborers and betel addicts and alcoholics, by and large. Some phenotypes of this:
-middle-aged guy in tight flowered poly shirt, open to the navel, also wearing a batik skirt (sarong), with shaggy bedhead ‘do
-young guy in short shorts, pink flipflops, big curly Sri-fro, and about twelve necklaces
- the Sri Lankan punk: plaid short-sleeve button-down with plaid sarong
Also notable: the women cops, especially traffic cops, wear tight knee-length skirts and tucked-in shirts and little Gestapo-y shiny caps and belts and lots of insignia. Their uniforms are sort of mauve and they wear matching ankle socks and laced oxfords, making them look like some kind of paramilitary R. Crumb fantasy. Hott!
...I am reading Frantz Fanon, and think he would disapprove of my observations. A colonizer, clearly. His ideas about violence and hatred of the 'native' for the 'settler' are way out of line with my sense of the colonial past and memory here. Then again Sri Lanka didn't have a violent independence movement. No no; they waited till after independence for that!
Travel-ations and Grenades
Observations From a Somewhat Dangerous Land
I’ve just returned from a weekend in Prohibited Territory, or rather, The Places I’m Supposed to Ask the Embassy for Permission to Go. I didn’t. Had planned to visit Malka in Vavuniya: “VOW-nya” not “va-VOO-ni-ya,” as foreigners generally have it). However she and Kevin, her visiting pal from the US, had already commandeered a vehicle and invited some peeps from her NGO to go to Trincomalee on the coast to see the amazing kovil (Hindu temple) and lovely beaches there. Therefore I took a 5-hour normal bus—like a schoolbus, no AC though not warranted cuz the weather was nice—up to Vavuniya, spent the night and met some NGO folks, then shipped out early the next morning for Trinco.
Vavuniya is the last Army-controlled town north before you hit the Vanni, the amorphous strip of LTTE territory. The last Army checkpoint is about twenty minutes north on the A9; from there you can look down the road and see the first LTTE checkpoint, where they stop all vehicles, search your bags (for contraband, including porn, I am told), and charge you the traveling “tax.” Their income-generation projects, including the tax/bribe, are quite organized and clever. They’ve taken a page from the Mass. State Troopers and have tons of speed traps; suddenly the posted speed limit will go from 70kmph to 30kmph, for no reason, and they’ve got a cadre there with a “radar gun” (maybe working, maybe not) to tell you you’re doing 34. This is all hearsay, by the way—I didn’t go north of Vavuniya. Yet.
Going there, even as briefly as I did, was important and educational for me. I forget that many many people in this country do not speak Sinhala. It was a sort of mirror-world as compared to the places in Lanka I’m familiar with; similar layout of town, same types and chains of shops, much of the same food, etc; however most of the local shrines were to Ganesh or Kataragama rather than to Buddha, and the signs and conversations were in Tamil. There were lots of cows and bicycles, though that’s more a dry-zone thing than a religious or cultural thing. We in Kandy don’t ride bikes much because it’s hillier than San Francisco; your knees would die.
It chastened me. I generally assume that I ‘know’ Sri Lanka and can get along anywhere just fine. Plenty of people there speak Sinhala (at least a little), but it’s not their language and they’re a little indignant if you speak to them in Sinhala when they’d prefer English. The whole conflict, basically, has been about language rights; how foolish of me to think my Sinhala gives me quasi-insider access to the whole island? I hope to go to Jaffna sometime in January and see what that’s like. I may try to get some Tamil classes so that I’m not a total ignorant jerk.
Trinco is the beach area in the Northeast I visited as an ISLE student; then it was barely barely developed for tourism; lots of little guesthouses and “tourist rests” have sprouted up in the two years since then. About two weeks ago there was a lot of rioting and a bus was hand-grenaded there around the LTTE Heroes’ Day; it’s not LTTE territory but they have a large presence, and the raging Sinhala nationalists (a specific political party) basically made lots of trouble by trying to keep LTTE from flying their flags etc. Their flag is hideous, by the way—it’s a roaring tiger head and claws popping out a red background. It looks like a bad 70s high school mascot. Anyway the northeastern monsoon is still going strong, so, no tourists. Either that or they were chilling out inside their guesthouses.
The kovil was beautiful as I remember—perched high on a promontory between the main town area and the huge Trincomalee Bay (reputed site for secret US Navy submarine base). There are amazing ocean views and waves shooting up fissures in the cliff-face, gaudily painted fishing boats bobbing by below on the bluedeep, strips of bright gold—threaded coloured fabric tied to tree branches (part of worship) fluttering in the breeze. We burned incense, got our foreheads decorated with sacred ash and oil and red powder, and smashed coconuts.
Smashing coconuts is fun; you put camphor blocks on top of them, set the camphor on fire, and wave the smoke around your head before hurling the coconut with all your might onto a big rock provided for the purpose. Monkeys hang around to eat the smashed bits. It was a Sunday, nice day for agoen’ to the temple, so there were more coconuts than the monkeys could handle. You really have to slam the coconut if you want it to break properly (spilling the coconut water and putting out the camphor and fulfilling your vow or whatever) and often they don’t break the first time so you see people fishing their coconuts out of the wreckage pile and trying again. Sometimes they’ll nab someone else’s insufficiently smashed coconut and give that one a go, too. Old ladies are the best at the wind-up. I am pitiful especially given my extreme height and muscularity compared to your average 4’10” 85lb. sari-wrapped achchi.
Lucky for us the rain stopped while we were climbing up to the kovil and doing our pujas. As we were walking down it started drizzling and the Sri Lankans, wise as they are about the nature of rain, hightailed it to the van. Malka and I mocked them and sauntered leisurely down, forgetting that an afternoon drizzle during monsoon is basically the sixty seconds before it Really Starts Raining. We stopped under a very effective tree once the windows of heaven were opened and waited for the driver, Kumar, to bring us an umbrella. Then we went into town and stuffed ourselves with buriyani.
After that it cleared up again and so we went 20km north to this gorgeous beach. It was cloudy and windy but Malka and I decided to put swimsuits on, and basically risked flashing a small busload of innocent-looking Lankans and some little boys selling candy. The water was lovely and warm[-er than the air] and the waves quite pleasant. As opposed to the beaches in the south, which shelve off pretty quickly, there the water is shallow for about 100 yards offshore, so you have this enormous breaker zone with about waist-high water and smallish waves (which break further out and re-form) rolling in.
Eventually we hauled back to the van and heading back towards Anuradhapura. You have to understand that this constitutes about three hours each leg (Vav-Trinco-A’pura) over Very Lousy Roads some of the time. The dry zone is beautiful though, and nice to drive in when the checkpoints and potholes are scarce. We stopped to buy a fish (and a bucket, and ice) to take for dinner, and then to have tea and egg hoppers, and then for buffalo curd (which is best in that region). We arrived in A’pura in pouring rain at about eight-thirty and were dropped at the house of Malka’s NGO’s chairman, a lovely lovely open-air building on the edge of one of the wewas (“tanks,” huge ancient-built-still-in-use reservoirs) and showered and drank tea and waited for the housekeeper/cook/cool dude, Susila, to cook our fish. Having eaten we fell into exhausted stuffed stupor.
Today I came back to Kandy. Five hours on a bus Saturday, six-plus in a van yesterday, and three and a half today—on an A/C bus too, which is really tiring because it’s stuffy and cold—I’m tiiiiired. Did some in-town errands which I can hardly remember at this point and then went to ICES for the Sunday papers.
Read about a hand-grenade bombing in Colombo Saturday; there was a big Indian film-star concert (20,000 audience) and someone threw a grenade near the VIP area. Two people died. The event had been protested because it fell on the one-year death anniversary (an important date for Buddhists) of this influential nationalist-extremist monk from the JHU, the monks’ party. There were protests earlier in the day before the concert and a bunch of monks were having a fast-unto-death, which they called off when the concert organizers formally apologized.
Anyway no one seems to know what the grenade business was about. It can’t be LTTE because it’s way out of their line (suicide bombers, actual specific people or institutions targeted) and it probably isn’t the JHU given that their protest was already happening someplace else at that point. My theory is that it was someone with a grenade and an Imp of the Perverse—apparently the people killed and injured were near but not in the VIP seating area, and the thrower may have simply wanted to throw ordinance around. There were lots of pyrotechnics and firecrackers going off anyway. Maybe s/he aimed badly.
It’s a terrible shame of course—besides the loss of life, it’s a real blow to the social world. The last thing Lankans need is a reason to be scared of going out and having fun. People are already distrustful of others and afraid of being ‘out’ and vulnerable. It’s the stay-at-home mentality that keeps there from being a rich civil society here. There is this perception that the world is full of bad people, and if you leave home both your person and your house are going to get assaulted, robbed, etc. It’s the unpleasant side of a well-developed attachment to housebound R&R.
Anyway I’m blathering. More later, maybe. I have to go, like, do some work…
Observations From a Somewhat Dangerous Land
I’ve just returned from a weekend in Prohibited Territory, or rather, The Places I’m Supposed to Ask the Embassy for Permission to Go. I didn’t. Had planned to visit Malka in Vavuniya: “VOW-nya” not “va-VOO-ni-ya,” as foreigners generally have it). However she and Kevin, her visiting pal from the US, had already commandeered a vehicle and invited some peeps from her NGO to go to Trincomalee on the coast to see the amazing kovil (Hindu temple) and lovely beaches there. Therefore I took a 5-hour normal bus—like a schoolbus, no AC though not warranted cuz the weather was nice—up to Vavuniya, spent the night and met some NGO folks, then shipped out early the next morning for Trinco.
Vavuniya is the last Army-controlled town north before you hit the Vanni, the amorphous strip of LTTE territory. The last Army checkpoint is about twenty minutes north on the A9; from there you can look down the road and see the first LTTE checkpoint, where they stop all vehicles, search your bags (for contraband, including porn, I am told), and charge you the traveling “tax.” Their income-generation projects, including the tax/bribe, are quite organized and clever. They’ve taken a page from the Mass. State Troopers and have tons of speed traps; suddenly the posted speed limit will go from 70kmph to 30kmph, for no reason, and they’ve got a cadre there with a “radar gun” (maybe working, maybe not) to tell you you’re doing 34. This is all hearsay, by the way—I didn’t go north of Vavuniya. Yet.
Going there, even as briefly as I did, was important and educational for me. I forget that many many people in this country do not speak Sinhala. It was a sort of mirror-world as compared to the places in Lanka I’m familiar with; similar layout of town, same types and chains of shops, much of the same food, etc; however most of the local shrines were to Ganesh or Kataragama rather than to Buddha, and the signs and conversations were in Tamil. There were lots of cows and bicycles, though that’s more a dry-zone thing than a religious or cultural thing. We in Kandy don’t ride bikes much because it’s hillier than San Francisco; your knees would die.
It chastened me. I generally assume that I ‘know’ Sri Lanka and can get along anywhere just fine. Plenty of people there speak Sinhala (at least a little), but it’s not their language and they’re a little indignant if you speak to them in Sinhala when they’d prefer English. The whole conflict, basically, has been about language rights; how foolish of me to think my Sinhala gives me quasi-insider access to the whole island? I hope to go to Jaffna sometime in January and see what that’s like. I may try to get some Tamil classes so that I’m not a total ignorant jerk.
Trinco is the beach area in the Northeast I visited as an ISLE student; then it was barely barely developed for tourism; lots of little guesthouses and “tourist rests” have sprouted up in the two years since then. About two weeks ago there was a lot of rioting and a bus was hand-grenaded there around the LTTE Heroes’ Day; it’s not LTTE territory but they have a large presence, and the raging Sinhala nationalists (a specific political party) basically made lots of trouble by trying to keep LTTE from flying their flags etc. Their flag is hideous, by the way—it’s a roaring tiger head and claws popping out a red background. It looks like a bad 70s high school mascot. Anyway the northeastern monsoon is still going strong, so, no tourists. Either that or they were chilling out inside their guesthouses.
The kovil was beautiful as I remember—perched high on a promontory between the main town area and the huge Trincomalee Bay (reputed site for secret US Navy submarine base). There are amazing ocean views and waves shooting up fissures in the cliff-face, gaudily painted fishing boats bobbing by below on the bluedeep, strips of bright gold—threaded coloured fabric tied to tree branches (part of worship) fluttering in the breeze. We burned incense, got our foreheads decorated with sacred ash and oil and red powder, and smashed coconuts.
Smashing coconuts is fun; you put camphor blocks on top of them, set the camphor on fire, and wave the smoke around your head before hurling the coconut with all your might onto a big rock provided for the purpose. Monkeys hang around to eat the smashed bits. It was a Sunday, nice day for agoen’ to the temple, so there were more coconuts than the monkeys could handle. You really have to slam the coconut if you want it to break properly (spilling the coconut water and putting out the camphor and fulfilling your vow or whatever) and often they don’t break the first time so you see people fishing their coconuts out of the wreckage pile and trying again. Sometimes they’ll nab someone else’s insufficiently smashed coconut and give that one a go, too. Old ladies are the best at the wind-up. I am pitiful especially given my extreme height and muscularity compared to your average 4’10” 85lb. sari-wrapped achchi.
Lucky for us the rain stopped while we were climbing up to the kovil and doing our pujas. As we were walking down it started drizzling and the Sri Lankans, wise as they are about the nature of rain, hightailed it to the van. Malka and I mocked them and sauntered leisurely down, forgetting that an afternoon drizzle during monsoon is basically the sixty seconds before it Really Starts Raining. We stopped under a very effective tree once the windows of heaven were opened and waited for the driver, Kumar, to bring us an umbrella. Then we went into town and stuffed ourselves with buriyani.
After that it cleared up again and so we went 20km north to this gorgeous beach. It was cloudy and windy but Malka and I decided to put swimsuits on, and basically risked flashing a small busload of innocent-looking Lankans and some little boys selling candy. The water was lovely and warm[-er than the air] and the waves quite pleasant. As opposed to the beaches in the south, which shelve off pretty quickly, there the water is shallow for about 100 yards offshore, so you have this enormous breaker zone with about waist-high water and smallish waves (which break further out and re-form) rolling in.
Eventually we hauled back to the van and heading back towards Anuradhapura. You have to understand that this constitutes about three hours each leg (Vav-Trinco-A’pura) over Very Lousy Roads some of the time. The dry zone is beautiful though, and nice to drive in when the checkpoints and potholes are scarce. We stopped to buy a fish (and a bucket, and ice) to take for dinner, and then to have tea and egg hoppers, and then for buffalo curd (which is best in that region). We arrived in A’pura in pouring rain at about eight-thirty and were dropped at the house of Malka’s NGO’s chairman, a lovely lovely open-air building on the edge of one of the wewas (“tanks,” huge ancient-built-still-in-use reservoirs) and showered and drank tea and waited for the housekeeper/cook/cool dude, Susila, to cook our fish. Having eaten we fell into exhausted stuffed stupor.
Today I came back to Kandy. Five hours on a bus Saturday, six-plus in a van yesterday, and three and a half today—on an A/C bus too, which is really tiring because it’s stuffy and cold—I’m tiiiiired. Did some in-town errands which I can hardly remember at this point and then went to ICES for the Sunday papers.
Read about a hand-grenade bombing in Colombo Saturday; there was a big Indian film-star concert (20,000 audience) and someone threw a grenade near the VIP area. Two people died. The event had been protested because it fell on the one-year death anniversary (an important date for Buddhists) of this influential nationalist-extremist monk from the JHU, the monks’ party. There were protests earlier in the day before the concert and a bunch of monks were having a fast-unto-death, which they called off when the concert organizers formally apologized.
Anyway no one seems to know what the grenade business was about. It can’t be LTTE because it’s way out of their line (suicide bombers, actual specific people or institutions targeted) and it probably isn’t the JHU given that their protest was already happening someplace else at that point. My theory is that it was someone with a grenade and an Imp of the Perverse—apparently the people killed and injured were near but not in the VIP seating area, and the thrower may have simply wanted to throw ordinance around. There were lots of pyrotechnics and firecrackers going off anyway. Maybe s/he aimed badly.
It’s a terrible shame of course—besides the loss of life, it’s a real blow to the social world. The last thing Lankans need is a reason to be scared of going out and having fun. People are already distrustful of others and afraid of being ‘out’ and vulnerable. It’s the stay-at-home mentality that keeps there from being a rich civil society here. There is this perception that the world is full of bad people, and if you leave home both your person and your house are going to get assaulted, robbed, etc. It’s the unpleasant side of a well-developed attachment to housebound R&R.
Anyway I’m blathering. More later, maybe. I have to go, like, do some work…
12.09.2004
Wink
Another Sucker Born Every Minute
After years of having a dog—and not having a cat—I had begun to think of myself as a dog-person. Actually I have become a Mandy-person; no other pet can possibly come close to the level of personality that dog has.
I’ve been wanting to take home one of the endless adorable road-dog puppies—or two. I even have a clever name all picked out, a pun in English and Sinhala. Lucky for me, unlucky for Puppy, my landlords hate dogs (“they will dirty the garden”) and I’ve acted in accordance with sanity. (You just know I’d end up trying to bring Puppy home with me in July.) Was thinking about a parakeet but the sight of a caged bird makes me sad and I have lots of birds to watch from my verandah.
However, I have been adopted by a cat. There are two that commute, several times daily, down the length of the verandah. I assumed they were buddies or coworkers or something, as they look alike and frequent the same routes. Last night one actually stopped off and sat a while in the doorway, blinking winking whiskers twitching, until I conceived that she was in fact hungry.
At that point I saw it all clear: myself as salve and slave to gritty-ethereal, grimy-delicate, streetwise-starving kitty. Also myself as hapless gooey-minded lover of cute animals, roped into providing tasty morsels for cunning little beggar. I had eaten all the dinner I wanted, so I figured she could have a shot at it. If a cat is willing to eat kotthu roti, well, she can have it. (Recall: kotthu is chopped Indian-style flatbread, with veggies and eggs and spices scrambled in. Not exactly Purina.) Sure enough, she chowed it down. Immediately I dubbed her “Wink,” after the manner of her previous communication, and resolved to feed her leftovers forever and ever.
I sat and watched, getting misty-eyed in the candlelight from my hastily improvised menorah’s two candles. I made it out of a Kerry-Edwards pillbox (thanks, Mom!) with six compartments open and one closed, to elevate the shamas. I hadn’t really gotten around to thinking about the seventh and eighth days, and now I don’t have to, because the plastic pillbox caught on fire when one of the candles burned down. Who knew plastic burned so easily? Who knows what awful chemicals I inhaled in the five seconds before I put it out? Anyway it was a valiant Little Menorah That Ultimately Couldn’t. Today I’m going to get some little traditional clay oil-lamps and dispense with the treacherous candle regime.
After Wink had eaten some, the other (bigger, male, ugly) cat showed up and my grrl-power instincts had me all up in arms. Tsst! Tsst! I angrily hissed—the customary “go away, cat/dog/crow/goat/cow/monkey” sound in Sri Lanka. Interestingly enough, for elephants you shout “hey! elephants!” repeatedly. Not that I’ve ever shooed an elephant. Sadly Wink fled, along with Mr. Meanie Cat.
She did reappear to polish off the kotthu, and then again this morning. I fixed her a bowl of instant full-cream milk, at which she turned up her nose. I ripped up some bread, which seemed to interest her more. The milk cooled down a bit and then she lapped it up like a good storybook kitty. (One has to mix the milk powder with hot water or it doesn’t blend well.) Now she’s eating slightly moldy cream caramel flanlike pudding, culled from my ill-ordered fridge, which the ants are loving as well. I’ve never seen a cat eat flan either.
I feel a bit bad whenever I take away some tasty sugary ant-food and kill fifty ants just in rinsing off the plate or wiping up the counter. I imagine that little spill or tablespoon of pudding could feed the ants like manna for hundreds of ant-years, an entire colony blessed by the generous god of Messy Cooking. I suppose the ants are doing okay; the ant population of my apartment and verandah probably outweighs me in strict biomass terms.
Wink has departed—teatime over, back to work no doubt—and the ants are having a ball with the leftover-leftover caramel. The container is a small reused margarine tub with the charming label “fat spread,” which as Jeremy says is a marketable term only outside the US. We don’t get a lot of ‘shortening’ here; it’s not a euphemistic language in general.
By the way—I didn’t vanish last week. I’ve been in Colombo and busy. Only one piece of physical mail upon return, you slackers! (Miriam, you don’t have to cover shirtless men on postcards.) Staying home today to read all 55 emails (a project with dial-up), catch up on fieldnotes (I do work, really), devour Cloud Atlas (amazing novel, read it!), and engage in the lengthy process of making hummus. Will try to post some thoughts on last week at some point. Along with all that other stuff I said I’d put here. Ha.
Happy Hanukkah, Happy Wink.
Another Sucker Born Every Minute
After years of having a dog—and not having a cat—I had begun to think of myself as a dog-person. Actually I have become a Mandy-person; no other pet can possibly come close to the level of personality that dog has.
I’ve been wanting to take home one of the endless adorable road-dog puppies—or two. I even have a clever name all picked out, a pun in English and Sinhala. Lucky for me, unlucky for Puppy, my landlords hate dogs (“they will dirty the garden”) and I’ve acted in accordance with sanity. (You just know I’d end up trying to bring Puppy home with me in July.) Was thinking about a parakeet but the sight of a caged bird makes me sad and I have lots of birds to watch from my verandah.
However, I have been adopted by a cat. There are two that commute, several times daily, down the length of the verandah. I assumed they were buddies or coworkers or something, as they look alike and frequent the same routes. Last night one actually stopped off and sat a while in the doorway, blinking winking whiskers twitching, until I conceived that she was in fact hungry.
At that point I saw it all clear: myself as salve and slave to gritty-ethereal, grimy-delicate, streetwise-starving kitty. Also myself as hapless gooey-minded lover of cute animals, roped into providing tasty morsels for cunning little beggar. I had eaten all the dinner I wanted, so I figured she could have a shot at it. If a cat is willing to eat kotthu roti, well, she can have it. (Recall: kotthu is chopped Indian-style flatbread, with veggies and eggs and spices scrambled in. Not exactly Purina.) Sure enough, she chowed it down. Immediately I dubbed her “Wink,” after the manner of her previous communication, and resolved to feed her leftovers forever and ever.
I sat and watched, getting misty-eyed in the candlelight from my hastily improvised menorah’s two candles. I made it out of a Kerry-Edwards pillbox (thanks, Mom!) with six compartments open and one closed, to elevate the shamas. I hadn’t really gotten around to thinking about the seventh and eighth days, and now I don’t have to, because the plastic pillbox caught on fire when one of the candles burned down. Who knew plastic burned so easily? Who knows what awful chemicals I inhaled in the five seconds before I put it out? Anyway it was a valiant Little Menorah That Ultimately Couldn’t. Today I’m going to get some little traditional clay oil-lamps and dispense with the treacherous candle regime.
After Wink had eaten some, the other (bigger, male, ugly) cat showed up and my grrl-power instincts had me all up in arms. Tsst! Tsst! I angrily hissed—the customary “go away, cat/dog/crow/goat/cow/monkey” sound in Sri Lanka. Interestingly enough, for elephants you shout “hey! elephants!” repeatedly. Not that I’ve ever shooed an elephant. Sadly Wink fled, along with Mr. Meanie Cat.
She did reappear to polish off the kotthu, and then again this morning. I fixed her a bowl of instant full-cream milk, at which she turned up her nose. I ripped up some bread, which seemed to interest her more. The milk cooled down a bit and then she lapped it up like a good storybook kitty. (One has to mix the milk powder with hot water or it doesn’t blend well.) Now she’s eating slightly moldy cream caramel flanlike pudding, culled from my ill-ordered fridge, which the ants are loving as well. I’ve never seen a cat eat flan either.
I feel a bit bad whenever I take away some tasty sugary ant-food and kill fifty ants just in rinsing off the plate or wiping up the counter. I imagine that little spill or tablespoon of pudding could feed the ants like manna for hundreds of ant-years, an entire colony blessed by the generous god of Messy Cooking. I suppose the ants are doing okay; the ant population of my apartment and verandah probably outweighs me in strict biomass terms.
Wink has departed—teatime over, back to work no doubt—and the ants are having a ball with the leftover-leftover caramel. The container is a small reused margarine tub with the charming label “fat spread,” which as Jeremy says is a marketable term only outside the US. We don’t get a lot of ‘shortening’ here; it’s not a euphemistic language in general.
By the way—I didn’t vanish last week. I’ve been in Colombo and busy. Only one piece of physical mail upon return, you slackers! (Miriam, you don’t have to cover shirtless men on postcards.) Staying home today to read all 55 emails (a project with dial-up), catch up on fieldnotes (I do work, really), devour Cloud Atlas (amazing novel, read it!), and engage in the lengthy process of making hummus. Will try to post some thoughts on last week at some point. Along with all that other stuff I said I’d put here. Ha.
Happy Hanukkah, Happy Wink.
12.02.2004
Eating My Way Through Kandy Hills
…sometimes life seems a promenade from food to food.
Awesome Sinhala class today. Topics for discussion: Yoga Exercise and The Middle Path. Fascinatingly* philosophical! It was good, though, because I was picking up on the new stuff quickly and understanding what we were reading and having fairly fluid flow of thoughts-into-Sinhala. The best feeling is when my mind sort of checks in with itself—are we actually understanding this or just saying yes yes yes?—and realizes that it’s not been translating the Sinhala, just swalleying it down and understanding it whole. Of course sometimes after a long conversation (or day) with no English I feel the swalleying as if I were a boa eating a boar.
After that I did fun things like breakfast! laundry! attack fruit flies! and in short order I was out on my way to town. Ran into Yvonne enroute and so we trishaw’d together to Mina’s school and saw her and all the adorable tiny kids in their adorable tiny uniforms—they wear bow ties!—and then on with it by myself. I just love taking the bus sometimes; it plays well into the amuse-the-locals aspect of the Fulbright. Extra points for jumping on or off with the bus in motion.
I went to photograph some possible sapphires for a certain future relation of mine. (I am so dutiful.) It was great fun, as always, to chat with the jewelry-store couple, Dhammika and Manik. We gossiped and speculated and they gave me, as always, more contacts in the wedding biz. Tomorrow I am going to meet a gown designer. Manik and Dhammika think I should model for this guy. He’s ‘very exclusive,’ apparently, so I’m vaguely daunted.
I already had one conversation this morning, with Herath, about how I’m getting a little bit fat. For the record, he agreed. However it’s good to be a little rounded here. Hard to say, then, whether he was agreeing in order to be polite…regardless I am all kinds of fussed about my body right now, especially as it’s starting to get used to the yoga and I want to make it work harder. Plus I’m getting fat! No, really! That gym thing sounds like a good plan.
In terms of food, though—I had a lunch packet from the almighty Soya Centre today, which was delicious and composed of quite unusual curries. The parippu was made with urud-dhal, which is very uncommonly nutty-delicious**. Other curries included a face-burning fennel-y tofu and soya-meat curry, ‘del’ curry (breadfruit, like a cross between a banana and a potato), and gotu kola, a sambol made with scraped coconut, green chilies, lime, and intense parsleyish greens. Also, my eating a lunch packet where I bought it and with my fingers scored high on the amuse-the-locals scale.
Then of course I had soya ice cream. Which I ate sitting on a curb alongside some beggars (a little ways away) and a group of gossiping/sarong-and-junk-adjusting men. The ice-cream-eating was even better at ATL, as proper people Do Not Sit By the Road. A white girl doing so is positively bizarre. One guy even said, quite joyfully, to me, “this is Sri Lanka!” as he went by staring at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was scolding me or congratulating me on being there.
After which I bought some awesome pants at Fashion Bug (no relation to the tacky USA chain, though tacky junk abounds) as part of a futile attempt to outfit myself for Colombo. I always feel frumpy when I’m there. Then I bought train tickets and somehow ended up with second class, which is okay (cheap!) but not what I intended (a guaranteed seat!).
Then off (via bus, more excitement) to Peradeniya to make the most of my ridiculous costly week-pass, only to find that the bloody library was closing early for ‘vacation,’ i.e., three days between the end of exams and the start of the new term. Bugger! Instead I drank some tea with about a quarter of a cup of sugar in it and ran into Saashi, a friend of a friend who I want to be friends with. He is working on an undergraduate thesis in Sociology about estate Tamils, which is his background, and promises to take me to Hindu weddings in exchange for editing help on the thesis. Mais oui.
From the disappointment of the library I walked the lovely 40 minutes back through the day’s fading heat and gave away lots of school-pens to the many, many kids enroute. Didn’t get scared by any vehicles or pissed off at any boys, so it was a success. I stopped off to see my pal, the tailor, and was fed with ‘sau’ which I had entirely forgotten as a Lankan food I love. It’s a pudding made with tapioca or sago and coconut milk and sugar, and it’s mildly saltysweet and just a delight.
At last I came home and did more laundry, read more books, made fabulous veggies-with-peanut-ginger-yogurt-sauce, and packed intensively for this silly four-day Colombo trip. A lot of the packing time was taken up with figuring out what to wear to the several social engagements I have lined up. I am such a flake sometimes! It’s under control, and I’m listening to Blondie, and I’ve got to get to bed soon.
[Perhaps because yoga is a big emotional release] I spent a while last night with happysad tears streaming down my face while listening to bittersweet music. Being far away is one thing, and the realization that I want to work and live outside the US more/later is hard to swallow amidst emotions of loneliness. Still missing yall.
*There has to be a good pun on ‘fascina-TINGLY’ although it won’t work well because ‘tingly’ is a word that doesn’t look like how it’s pronounced. Maybe a radio pun.
**Urud-dhal = my child's nutty friend.
***Wow, I wrote narration.
…sometimes life seems a promenade from food to food.
Awesome Sinhala class today. Topics for discussion: Yoga Exercise and The Middle Path. Fascinatingly* philosophical! It was good, though, because I was picking up on the new stuff quickly and understanding what we were reading and having fairly fluid flow of thoughts-into-Sinhala. The best feeling is when my mind sort of checks in with itself—are we actually understanding this or just saying yes yes yes?—and realizes that it’s not been translating the Sinhala, just swalleying it down and understanding it whole. Of course sometimes after a long conversation (or day) with no English I feel the swalleying as if I were a boa eating a boar.
After that I did fun things like breakfast! laundry! attack fruit flies! and in short order I was out on my way to town. Ran into Yvonne enroute and so we trishaw’d together to Mina’s school and saw her and all the adorable tiny kids in their adorable tiny uniforms—they wear bow ties!—and then on with it by myself. I just love taking the bus sometimes; it plays well into the amuse-the-locals aspect of the Fulbright. Extra points for jumping on or off with the bus in motion.
I went to photograph some possible sapphires for a certain future relation of mine. (I am so dutiful.) It was great fun, as always, to chat with the jewelry-store couple, Dhammika and Manik. We gossiped and speculated and they gave me, as always, more contacts in the wedding biz. Tomorrow I am going to meet a gown designer. Manik and Dhammika think I should model for this guy. He’s ‘very exclusive,’ apparently, so I’m vaguely daunted.
I already had one conversation this morning, with Herath, about how I’m getting a little bit fat. For the record, he agreed. However it’s good to be a little rounded here. Hard to say, then, whether he was agreeing in order to be polite…regardless I am all kinds of fussed about my body right now, especially as it’s starting to get used to the yoga and I want to make it work harder. Plus I’m getting fat! No, really! That gym thing sounds like a good plan.
In terms of food, though—I had a lunch packet from the almighty Soya Centre today, which was delicious and composed of quite unusual curries. The parippu was made with urud-dhal, which is very uncommonly nutty-delicious**. Other curries included a face-burning fennel-y tofu and soya-meat curry, ‘del’ curry (breadfruit, like a cross between a banana and a potato), and gotu kola, a sambol made with scraped coconut, green chilies, lime, and intense parsleyish greens. Also, my eating a lunch packet where I bought it and with my fingers scored high on the amuse-the-locals scale.
Then of course I had soya ice cream. Which I ate sitting on a curb alongside some beggars (a little ways away) and a group of gossiping/sarong-and-junk-adjusting men. The ice-cream-eating was even better at ATL, as proper people Do Not Sit By the Road. A white girl doing so is positively bizarre. One guy even said, quite joyfully, to me, “this is Sri Lanka!” as he went by staring at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was scolding me or congratulating me on being there.
After which I bought some awesome pants at Fashion Bug (no relation to the tacky USA chain, though tacky junk abounds) as part of a futile attempt to outfit myself for Colombo. I always feel frumpy when I’m there. Then I bought train tickets and somehow ended up with second class, which is okay (cheap!) but not what I intended (a guaranteed seat!).
Then off (via bus, more excitement) to Peradeniya to make the most of my ridiculous costly week-pass, only to find that the bloody library was closing early for ‘vacation,’ i.e., three days between the end of exams and the start of the new term. Bugger! Instead I drank some tea with about a quarter of a cup of sugar in it and ran into Saashi, a friend of a friend who I want to be friends with. He is working on an undergraduate thesis in Sociology about estate Tamils, which is his background, and promises to take me to Hindu weddings in exchange for editing help on the thesis. Mais oui.
From the disappointment of the library I walked the lovely 40 minutes back through the day’s fading heat and gave away lots of school-pens to the many, many kids enroute. Didn’t get scared by any vehicles or pissed off at any boys, so it was a success. I stopped off to see my pal, the tailor, and was fed with ‘sau’ which I had entirely forgotten as a Lankan food I love. It’s a pudding made with tapioca or sago and coconut milk and sugar, and it’s mildly saltysweet and just a delight.
At last I came home and did more laundry, read more books, made fabulous veggies-with-peanut-ginger-yogurt-sauce, and packed intensively for this silly four-day Colombo trip. A lot of the packing time was taken up with figuring out what to wear to the several social engagements I have lined up. I am such a flake sometimes! It’s under control, and I’m listening to Blondie, and I’ve got to get to bed soon.
[Perhaps because yoga is a big emotional release] I spent a while last night with happysad tears streaming down my face while listening to bittersweet music. Being far away is one thing, and the realization that I want to work and live outside the US more/later is hard to swallow amidst emotions of loneliness. Still missing yall.
*There has to be a good pun on ‘fascina-TINGLY’ although it won’t work well because ‘tingly’ is a word that doesn’t look like how it’s pronounced. Maybe a radio pun.
**Urud-dhal = my child's nutty friend.
***Wow, I wrote narration.
12.01.2004
Huggle Withall, Yo
From the Research Desk
There’s a beautiful lighting storm going on outside. It’s pretty chilly out. I am trying to tough it out vis-à-vis the weather, and not just run to put on a fleece when the temperature gets below 70. The dessert factor in chill-ness (both temperature and temperament) is significant as of now: I’m eating cream caramel pudding with English Toffee ice-cream. The English Toffee is particularly pleasant; it has a gritty consistency from the sugar not being entirely emulsified in the dairy. It melts differently on the tongue than I recall ice-cream doing. I’m certainly no expert!
My brain is a little fried as I’ve been working unconscionably hard this week. Somehow it doesn’t get me anywhere… I spent Monday morning doing Sinhala (see translation below) and then the rest of the day in the starchy Peradeniya library, for which I paid the royal sum of Rs.150/, then today in a tizzy; first with Jill in town ordering designs for our recently-purchased shalwar kameez sets, then at ICES with madhouse setting (they’re moving next door tomorrow), finally back in town for yoga and evermore grocery shopping, then at last home again. The frazzle will only get more, I think; I am going to Colombo Thursday, before which time I must make it through more Sinhala class, photograph some sapphires, call a bunch of people, buy train tickets, and generally keep it all up. I need a vacation.
The research I’m doing now is equally fascinating and dull. The dull stuff is, like, economics journals from the 80s with articles debating the validity and usefulness of weird statistics like the SMAM (Singulate Mean Age at Marriage) versus other medians and means normative figures. If your eyes are glazing over, yeah, you see what I mean. The fascinating stuff is simply better written but often less directly related to my project. What happens is, I read something, start doubting its usefulness, then realize that of course it’s useful if I think it’s related. If it makes me think. If it keeps me in the library long enough to string coherent thoughts together.
The best part about it is that I do spend a lot of time reading work by people who are really smart, and sometimes a little smart-ass in clever and insightful ways. So far the best example of this is from an excellent postcolonialist book, criticizing the colonial practice of photographing ‘natives’ in largely made-up ‘traditional costumes.’ Apparently they were predictably drawn to a particular set of sartorial choices: “Early ethnographers were largely men, who despite showing considerable interest in nakedness showed much less in clothes” (Tarlo, E. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India).
I also spent a while reading social histories of marriage traditions. This is surprisingly readable stuff—16th century English Puritan marriage manuals are a stitch. The exegesis of them is even better, of course; that they were written for a middle class audience by nobles who basically didn’t know what they were talking about. (Try telling Queen Elizabeth that women should defer to their husbands in all things, ‘even if it go against God’!) Advice columns in all eras are good reading, and the stuff doesn’t go stale as one might expect. Before there was evolutionary psychology, there was the rudimentary understanding that even when economic conditions are difficult, people will persist in getting married—notably, money won’t matter to a man “if he have his pretty pussy to huggle withall” (Stubbes, P. On Wives, 1567).
Speaking of ‘withall,’ Samir and Jeremy and Malka were all about this weekend, Malka first then the boyz. It was a good antidote to my current semimalaise of loneliness. It was also quite pleasant to host, as I enjoy cooking for people and trying to make things nice and generally fussing in a low-level way. Guests also help to boot my lazy butt into doing stuff instead of just enjoying multiple cups of tea and pages of the current novel or non-current New Yorker.
Saturday night we had dinner at my new favorite S. Indian place in Kandy, down the street from the overpriced touristy one… it was a party! (Present: myself, Jill, Samir, Jeremy, and Gavin, my bizarre twin.) We let Samir do the ordering cuz he’s, like, Indian-American, even though the waiters really wanted me to do it as I’d been there before and spoken Sinhala with them. I obliged with speech but not ordering, which was a flawed decision as Samir ordered enough food for about twelve people… 12 idlies, 6 vadais, 2 huge 4-foot stuffed dosas (I am not joking here!), sambols, chutneys, sambar, dhal, on and on and on. He thought he was ordering by the piece, but he was ordering “portions” which come with several pieces, dig?
We were fat little piggies and then came home here to drink arrack+ginger beer and eat ice-cream (the aforementioned Toffee). Incidentally, these three ingredients make a fabulous alcoholic Lankan milkshake/float delight. We sat in the glorious full-moonlight, under the glorious stars, on the glorious verandah. The only imperfection was that my Astroturf lawn is rolled up to keep it clean; we have roofwork being done. A mere trifle!
…Janaka’s yoga class was again intense and brought me near tears but in a good way, really. It is an emotional as well as physical release. Today included the desired hip-openers, and how; my hips are so open that my legs are practically falling off. At one point he was giving corrections in his usual muscular/weight-bearing way and I breathed, “aeti…” [enough]. He smiled sweetly, leaned into me, and murmured right back, “madi!” [more]; he was right. He knows his stuff. I have made progress though some poses remain ridiculously difficult. I must practice more at home.
Another bit of reading I did said that ‘love is frequently the art of the possible.’ It’s feeling a little distant and impossible these days, and I sorely lack the art, it seems. I am missing you out there, you people I love and can’t possibly huggle. I’d like to huggle with-all-y’all. Huggle each other for me, please.
and, Happy December! yikes, it's December!
From the Research Desk
There’s a beautiful lighting storm going on outside. It’s pretty chilly out. I am trying to tough it out vis-à-vis the weather, and not just run to put on a fleece when the temperature gets below 70. The dessert factor in chill-ness (both temperature and temperament) is significant as of now: I’m eating cream caramel pudding with English Toffee ice-cream. The English Toffee is particularly pleasant; it has a gritty consistency from the sugar not being entirely emulsified in the dairy. It melts differently on the tongue than I recall ice-cream doing. I’m certainly no expert!
My brain is a little fried as I’ve been working unconscionably hard this week. Somehow it doesn’t get me anywhere… I spent Monday morning doing Sinhala (see translation below) and then the rest of the day in the starchy Peradeniya library, for which I paid the royal sum of Rs.150/, then today in a tizzy; first with Jill in town ordering designs for our recently-purchased shalwar kameez sets, then at ICES with madhouse setting (they’re moving next door tomorrow), finally back in town for yoga and evermore grocery shopping, then at last home again. The frazzle will only get more, I think; I am going to Colombo Thursday, before which time I must make it through more Sinhala class, photograph some sapphires, call a bunch of people, buy train tickets, and generally keep it all up. I need a vacation.
The research I’m doing now is equally fascinating and dull. The dull stuff is, like, economics journals from the 80s with articles debating the validity and usefulness of weird statistics like the SMAM (Singulate Mean Age at Marriage) versus other medians and means normative figures. If your eyes are glazing over, yeah, you see what I mean. The fascinating stuff is simply better written but often less directly related to my project. What happens is, I read something, start doubting its usefulness, then realize that of course it’s useful if I think it’s related. If it makes me think. If it keeps me in the library long enough to string coherent thoughts together.
The best part about it is that I do spend a lot of time reading work by people who are really smart, and sometimes a little smart-ass in clever and insightful ways. So far the best example of this is from an excellent postcolonialist book, criticizing the colonial practice of photographing ‘natives’ in largely made-up ‘traditional costumes.’ Apparently they were predictably drawn to a particular set of sartorial choices: “Early ethnographers were largely men, who despite showing considerable interest in nakedness showed much less in clothes” (Tarlo, E. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India).
I also spent a while reading social histories of marriage traditions. This is surprisingly readable stuff—16th century English Puritan marriage manuals are a stitch. The exegesis of them is even better, of course; that they were written for a middle class audience by nobles who basically didn’t know what they were talking about. (Try telling Queen Elizabeth that women should defer to their husbands in all things, ‘even if it go against God’!) Advice columns in all eras are good reading, and the stuff doesn’t go stale as one might expect. Before there was evolutionary psychology, there was the rudimentary understanding that even when economic conditions are difficult, people will persist in getting married—notably, money won’t matter to a man “if he have his pretty pussy to huggle withall” (Stubbes, P. On Wives, 1567).
Speaking of ‘withall,’ Samir and Jeremy and Malka were all about this weekend, Malka first then the boyz. It was a good antidote to my current semimalaise of loneliness. It was also quite pleasant to host, as I enjoy cooking for people and trying to make things nice and generally fussing in a low-level way. Guests also help to boot my lazy butt into doing stuff instead of just enjoying multiple cups of tea and pages of the current novel or non-current New Yorker.
Saturday night we had dinner at my new favorite S. Indian place in Kandy, down the street from the overpriced touristy one… it was a party! (Present: myself, Jill, Samir, Jeremy, and Gavin, my bizarre twin.) We let Samir do the ordering cuz he’s, like, Indian-American, even though the waiters really wanted me to do it as I’d been there before and spoken Sinhala with them. I obliged with speech but not ordering, which was a flawed decision as Samir ordered enough food for about twelve people… 12 idlies, 6 vadais, 2 huge 4-foot stuffed dosas (I am not joking here!), sambols, chutneys, sambar, dhal, on and on and on. He thought he was ordering by the piece, but he was ordering “portions” which come with several pieces, dig?
We were fat little piggies and then came home here to drink arrack+ginger beer and eat ice-cream (the aforementioned Toffee). Incidentally, these three ingredients make a fabulous alcoholic Lankan milkshake/float delight. We sat in the glorious full-moonlight, under the glorious stars, on the glorious verandah. The only imperfection was that my Astroturf lawn is rolled up to keep it clean; we have roofwork being done. A mere trifle!
…Janaka’s yoga class was again intense and brought me near tears but in a good way, really. It is an emotional as well as physical release. Today included the desired hip-openers, and how; my hips are so open that my legs are practically falling off. At one point he was giving corrections in his usual muscular/weight-bearing way and I breathed, “aeti…” [enough]. He smiled sweetly, leaned into me, and murmured right back, “madi!” [more]; he was right. He knows his stuff. I have made progress though some poses remain ridiculously difficult. I must practice more at home.
Another bit of reading I did said that ‘love is frequently the art of the possible.’ It’s feeling a little distant and impossible these days, and I sorely lack the art, it seems. I am missing you out there, you people I love and can’t possibly huggle. I’d like to huggle with-all-y’all. Huggle each other for me, please.
and, Happy December! yikes, it's December!
Mudelihami’s Eyeglasses
A sad story, and yet funny
His name is Mudelihami. He is fifty. Mudelihami never went to school. Because of that, he doesn’t know how to read and write. He hasn’t learned even one letter. But Mudelihami’s friends can read and write well. Those guys use eyeglasses. Therefore, they can read the newspapers.
So Mudelihami thought that if he had eyeglasses, they would be the thing he wanted and he would be able to read. After that Mudelihami went to the eyeglass-store to buy eyeglasses. Mudelihami asked the clerk working in the store whether he could buy some eyeglasses. So, the clerk gave Mudelihami a newspaper to read, because he wanted to test Mudelihami’s eyes. But Mudelihami couldn’t read even one letter.
The second time, the clerk put a pair of glasses on Mudelihami’s eyes and said, “read this paper.” But even that time, he couldn’t read. The next time he gave him another pair of glasses and a different book to read. But, even with that, he couldn’t read. In this way the clerk, having given Mudelihami all the glasses in the store, saw that even so he couldn’t read.
Finally Mudelihami said, “The glasses in this store are no good. If I could get a really good pair of glasses, I would be able to read.” Upon hearing this story, the clerk gave him yet another pair of glasses and yet another book. This time, though, the clerk saw that Mudelihami was trying to read the book while it was upside-down. He asked Mudelihami, “do you know how to read and write?”
Now Mudelihami said, “I don’t know the letters, but if I have good glasses I’ll be able to read and write. In this store, the glasses are not good.” Mudelihami said, again, to the clerk. Then the clerk got a bit angry. He said, “Mudelihami, you’re innocent, but really stupid. If you want to read and write, you must learn the letters. Even if you have glasses you won’t be able to read. Go, learn the letters, and come back. Then if your eyes have a problem, I’ll find some good glasses for you.”
But Mudelihami never went back to that store to get glasses.
A sad story, and yet funny
His name is Mudelihami. He is fifty. Mudelihami never went to school. Because of that, he doesn’t know how to read and write. He hasn’t learned even one letter. But Mudelihami’s friends can read and write well. Those guys use eyeglasses. Therefore, they can read the newspapers.
So Mudelihami thought that if he had eyeglasses, they would be the thing he wanted and he would be able to read. After that Mudelihami went to the eyeglass-store to buy eyeglasses. Mudelihami asked the clerk working in the store whether he could buy some eyeglasses. So, the clerk gave Mudelihami a newspaper to read, because he wanted to test Mudelihami’s eyes. But Mudelihami couldn’t read even one letter.
The second time, the clerk put a pair of glasses on Mudelihami’s eyes and said, “read this paper.” But even that time, he couldn’t read. The next time he gave him another pair of glasses and a different book to read. But, even with that, he couldn’t read. In this way the clerk, having given Mudelihami all the glasses in the store, saw that even so he couldn’t read.
Finally Mudelihami said, “The glasses in this store are no good. If I could get a really good pair of glasses, I would be able to read.” Upon hearing this story, the clerk gave him yet another pair of glasses and yet another book. This time, though, the clerk saw that Mudelihami was trying to read the book while it was upside-down. He asked Mudelihami, “do you know how to read and write?”
Now Mudelihami said, “I don’t know the letters, but if I have good glasses I’ll be able to read and write. In this store, the glasses are not good.” Mudelihami said, again, to the clerk. Then the clerk got a bit angry. He said, “Mudelihami, you’re innocent, but really stupid. If you want to read and write, you must learn the letters. Even if you have glasses you won’t be able to read. Go, learn the letters, and come back. Then if your eyes have a problem, I’ll find some good glasses for you.”
But Mudelihami never went back to that store to get glasses.
11.27.2004
Crude Statement
I really appreciate the butt-washing apparatus in my bathroom. It resembles nothing so much as a kitchen-sink-sprayer but it’s attached to the wall between the toilet and shower. Not only is it good for butt-washing (I begin to understand why people here think using paper is dirty and gross), it’s excellent for foot-washing, something one wants to do often under the road conditions of rainy-season-mud. I sit on the closed toilet and cheerfully scrub’n’rinse with reachable soap, aimable water, and casual aplomb.
I really appreciate the butt-washing apparatus in my bathroom. It resembles nothing so much as a kitchen-sink-sprayer but it’s attached to the wall between the toilet and shower. Not only is it good for butt-washing (I begin to understand why people here think using paper is dirty and gross), it’s excellent for foot-washing, something one wants to do often under the road conditions of rainy-season-mud. I sit on the closed toilet and cheerfully scrub’n’rinse with reachable soap, aimable water, and casual aplomb.
Let the Nice Life Go Along With You
Hear hear! Give thanks for being in Sri Lanka, sayeth Jill Gavin and I in a remarkably poor caricature of a Thanksgiving lunch. (Rice and two lame curries. That restaurant came recommended, even! Harumph.) We hadn’t really even planned to have a “Thanksgiving lunch” but just to hang out, and then I was reminded that oh, it’s Thanksgiving.
The title, above, is imprinted on the handles of some pretty plastic spoons I bought. I think the set is from Japan; who else but the Japanese puts such things on plasticware? Each spoon is labeled with the name of a fruit and a nice little color drawing of that fruit. I find them charmingly cheerful. Each time I grab one from my glassful of cutlery, I have a moment of delightful anticipation—what fruit, today? Watermelon! Apple! Mango! The phrase is a good mantra for me, half blessing and half ‘hakuna matata.’
Yesternight I wrote long and hard in my journal about last Thanksgiving. I saw things I had never seen before:
“…it may have been the first time I realized how irrevocably we are all getting older, all the time—words deepening in complexity and savor in mouths as we speak them. I started seeing the family—both my families—not as people who happened to be related, but as people who chose, year by year, to relate; to come together and torment and love one another as only family (of biology and habit and grit) can do. Plans are made, dates are set, side dishes cooked, favors done, small niceties remembered. It’s all intentional, and I am so grateful.”
So, thanks, family. Remind each other to read this, as I’m not following through on my promise of pinging people when I post. As you can see, my use of em-dashes and semicolons and horrid run-on sentences is even more lavish in my private writing. Curses on the finished thought!
I would have been more thankful yesterday if the darn Peradeniya Library people would stop being such sticks-in-the-mud regarding my application for Postgraduate Reader status. (Doesn’t that sound lovely?) They will accept me, but want me to pay the way-exorbitant rate of Rs.600/ a month for library access. We’re not talking about taking books out, by the way; this is just to get in the door and read stuff. You can’t even bring outside books in, just pen and paper and a small purse if you’ve got one. So annoying! I should be able to pay the local rate of Rs.100/ a month, as I have a residence visa and I work at a local institution which is technically affiliated with the University.
However, the head librarian says that “space is at a premium” in the reading rooms. Total lie, they’re always at least 90% empty—like, rows upon rows of chairs in carrels. He implied that the higher price was thus to discourage me from being there, which is ridiculous. They know that they can basically extort the money from me, because I’m a foreigner and probably have it. It’s totally unjustified, though.
I feel a little guilty about this because I’m thinking of joining a gym at the rate of Rs.750/ a month. Obviously my work should merit at least similar financial consideration. However realistically I am going to go to the gym at least twice a week; not so with the library cuz my office has a pretty good one. Maybe I can get the Fulbright Commission to pay my library access fees. Besides twice-weekly gym visits will do immeasurably more for my self-esteem than twice-weekly library schleps.
Hear hear! Give thanks for being in Sri Lanka, sayeth Jill Gavin and I in a remarkably poor caricature of a Thanksgiving lunch. (Rice and two lame curries. That restaurant came recommended, even! Harumph.) We hadn’t really even planned to have a “Thanksgiving lunch” but just to hang out, and then I was reminded that oh, it’s Thanksgiving.
The title, above, is imprinted on the handles of some pretty plastic spoons I bought. I think the set is from Japan; who else but the Japanese puts such things on plasticware? Each spoon is labeled with the name of a fruit and a nice little color drawing of that fruit. I find them charmingly cheerful. Each time I grab one from my glassful of cutlery, I have a moment of delightful anticipation—what fruit, today? Watermelon! Apple! Mango! The phrase is a good mantra for me, half blessing and half ‘hakuna matata.’
Yesternight I wrote long and hard in my journal about last Thanksgiving. I saw things I had never seen before:
“…it may have been the first time I realized how irrevocably we are all getting older, all the time—words deepening in complexity and savor in mouths as we speak them. I started seeing the family—both my families—not as people who happened to be related, but as people who chose, year by year, to relate; to come together and torment and love one another as only family (of biology and habit and grit) can do. Plans are made, dates are set, side dishes cooked, favors done, small niceties remembered. It’s all intentional, and I am so grateful.”
So, thanks, family. Remind each other to read this, as I’m not following through on my promise of pinging people when I post. As you can see, my use of em-dashes and semicolons and horrid run-on sentences is even more lavish in my private writing. Curses on the finished thought!
I would have been more thankful yesterday if the darn Peradeniya Library people would stop being such sticks-in-the-mud regarding my application for Postgraduate Reader status. (Doesn’t that sound lovely?) They will accept me, but want me to pay the way-exorbitant rate of Rs.600/ a month for library access. We’re not talking about taking books out, by the way; this is just to get in the door and read stuff. You can’t even bring outside books in, just pen and paper and a small purse if you’ve got one. So annoying! I should be able to pay the local rate of Rs.100/ a month, as I have a residence visa and I work at a local institution which is technically affiliated with the University.
However, the head librarian says that “space is at a premium” in the reading rooms. Total lie, they’re always at least 90% empty—like, rows upon rows of chairs in carrels. He implied that the higher price was thus to discourage me from being there, which is ridiculous. They know that they can basically extort the money from me, because I’m a foreigner and probably have it. It’s totally unjustified, though.
I feel a little guilty about this because I’m thinking of joining a gym at the rate of Rs.750/ a month. Obviously my work should merit at least similar financial consideration. However realistically I am going to go to the gym at least twice a week; not so with the library cuz my office has a pretty good one. Maybe I can get the Fulbright Commission to pay my library access fees. Besides twice-weekly gym visits will do immeasurably more for my self-esteem than twice-weekly library schleps.
11.26.2004
Woman Sues Over Loss of Breasts, Doctor Sues Over Loss of Reputation
(a headline in today's Island, the Herald of Sri Lanka)
I'll let you figure that one out for yourself. The article was about two column inches long. We're not talking about a tabloid, folks; this is one of the older and more widely read papers in the country.
In other news, have people been following the political shit that's going down here? Last week a Supreme Court judge was assassinated, presumably by LTTE cadres but no one is saying for sure because that would be finger-pointing on a grand scale. It must have been a very secret thing of course, because all officials at that level are highly guarded. That no one has been caught means it was REALLY sophisticated; usually assassins are predictably cornered and shot dead. I'm sure this inspires confidence in you statesiders.
The (wack, politically adept but falled into her own snares of late) President declared, with the certainty that goes along with the Executive Presidency here, that the death penalty would be reinstated in order that it might be used against the assassins, when they are found. And you thought Bush had power! Well. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty (in a Buddhist country, folks) three guys have been condemned to hang for murder and conspiracy. Unrelated to the judge guy. Sri Lanka has ordered four new special hanging ropes from China and is training the youngest hangman in the island's history.
The Norwegian moderators of the peace process have all but decamped, not because things are dangerous for them personally but because the talks have stalled. A delegation from the Norwegian government, much more powerful than the SLMM (--Monitoring Mission), visited last week and prodded the LTTE to stop their human rights abuses, like recruiting kids and shooting folks in their beds, and criticized the government for restricting regional authorities more than they previously agreed was appropriate. At heart this conflict is regional and minority representation in a country that is ridiculously, inefficiently, corruptly centrally administered.
If that weren't enough, well, Saturday is Martyr's Day, when charismatic/deadly LTTE leader Prabhakaran typically makes a big speech about all the stuff that has gone down in the past year and what's to come in the next. As you might predict, this is not a happy holiday for most Sri Lankans; I mean, he's the orchestrator of about 20 year's worth of the last 40 years' civil unrest.
How this plays out for me is harder to analyze. I have a deep attachment to this country and these people. I also have a certain arrogance, related to being a northeastern liberal Amerikan, that the problems are not really so complicated, and the guns that are being stuck to (in some cases quite literally) are really, really pointless, and we'd all be better off if Some People in government and civil society both would stop being so stubborn.
I even get this feeling with people I love and respect--my Sinhala teacher, for one. He's one of my favorite people here; constantly happy, overjoyed when you (I) learn anything, easy to make laugh, sympathetic, infectiously enthusiastic about any experiences or insights you (I) have. I don't like to talk politics with him because I know he actually believes the plan for regional devolution of governmental powers is a ploy orchestrated by the LTTE to start a separate country. He supports the Wack President. He's not entirely wrong though...
It's a case where both sides, the Government and the LTTE, have broken so many rules, so many expectations, so many agreements--so many times--that a stalemate seems like the only possible solution. People are exhausted, and the merits of "peace" as opposed to "no war" (significant difference; one involves a settlement and disarmament) are not well understood and not desirable to all.
Case in point: a major incentive to peace, under the previous government, was that development, investment by international corporations and funding from nongovernmental sources would simply flood the economy once a strong ceasefire held up and progress was apparent in negotiations. For many reasons, including that the Wack Prez dissolved the government as is her wont and habit, that didn't happen. Poor folks stayed poor, and rich folks didn't suffer, and the prices of rice and petrol keep rising. Suddenly peace is irrelevant and expensive and detrimental to (many) people's vision of a strong nation, because we've got to Compromise, Settle, Share Power. This is after all a socialist country and folks expect the government to Provide. A government that is engaged in a negotiated attrition of power isn't one focused on getting the bread (rice) on the table (banana leaf) and the monks in the temples.
In some ways they were right. Development isn't guaranteed or even likely to help the poorest people's economic woes, and will probably exacerbate their perceived poverty by elevating the attractiveness of consumer goods and Western values. A country as proud of its history (disputed as that history is) and culture (divisive as that culture is) as this one had better be careful about what is getting imported along with all those potential jobs. The newspapers, even the better ones, are chock-full-o'-editorials about the need for a return to Lankan values.
Those values, as I am fond of pondering while enjoying my third teatime of the day, really have something going on: respect for family and leisure time, disregard for making a lot of money or getting ahead, devotion to personal life and introspection. Sri Lankans are not workaholics or greedy or ignorant, in ways that are inconsistent with how many of them are undereducated or unexposed to the world. Their values really are worthwhile, and certainly for me, a good antidote to the anxious frenzied individualistic cults of Amerika.
Enough political/psychological rambling. I can only hope that the ceasefire holds and the stalemate at least continues if not improves. Martyr's Day, I'm having a tea/cocktail party. Unrelatedly.
Has anyone read A Room With a View? It's so good. Unfortunately it's short. I watched "Mona Lisa Smile" yesterday and was disappointed by how little I found to criticize in it; was hoping for more covert feminism-bashing and censure of female liberation even as the movie sought to promote it. It seemed pretty nuanced and unobvious, except for the part where Julia Stiles explains her desire to Really Be a Housewife, in this stupidstupidstupid fakey Boston Brahmin accent. The synchro scene was far too short, as well.
and, for some laughs--
topics for possible descriptive analysis: vote for your favorite! these are all funny but Old News.
1. My two stalkers, by the names of "Sham" and "Buddhi" (say it with me: Booty).
2. My career as a homewrecker has just begun.
3. My valiant efforts not to pay an exorbitant Rs.600/ a month to use the friggin' library.
You just can't make this stuff up.
(a headline in today's Island, the Herald of Sri Lanka)
I'll let you figure that one out for yourself. The article was about two column inches long. We're not talking about a tabloid, folks; this is one of the older and more widely read papers in the country.
In other news, have people been following the political shit that's going down here? Last week a Supreme Court judge was assassinated, presumably by LTTE cadres but no one is saying for sure because that would be finger-pointing on a grand scale. It must have been a very secret thing of course, because all officials at that level are highly guarded. That no one has been caught means it was REALLY sophisticated; usually assassins are predictably cornered and shot dead. I'm sure this inspires confidence in you statesiders.
The (wack, politically adept but falled into her own snares of late) President declared, with the certainty that goes along with the Executive Presidency here, that the death penalty would be reinstated in order that it might be used against the assassins, when they are found. And you thought Bush had power! Well. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty (in a Buddhist country, folks) three guys have been condemned to hang for murder and conspiracy. Unrelated to the judge guy. Sri Lanka has ordered four new special hanging ropes from China and is training the youngest hangman in the island's history.
The Norwegian moderators of the peace process have all but decamped, not because things are dangerous for them personally but because the talks have stalled. A delegation from the Norwegian government, much more powerful than the SLMM (--Monitoring Mission), visited last week and prodded the LTTE to stop their human rights abuses, like recruiting kids and shooting folks in their beds, and criticized the government for restricting regional authorities more than they previously agreed was appropriate. At heart this conflict is regional and minority representation in a country that is ridiculously, inefficiently, corruptly centrally administered.
If that weren't enough, well, Saturday is Martyr's Day, when charismatic/deadly LTTE leader Prabhakaran typically makes a big speech about all the stuff that has gone down in the past year and what's to come in the next. As you might predict, this is not a happy holiday for most Sri Lankans; I mean, he's the orchestrator of about 20 year's worth of the last 40 years' civil unrest.
How this plays out for me is harder to analyze. I have a deep attachment to this country and these people. I also have a certain arrogance, related to being a northeastern liberal Amerikan, that the problems are not really so complicated, and the guns that are being stuck to (in some cases quite literally) are really, really pointless, and we'd all be better off if Some People in government and civil society both would stop being so stubborn.
I even get this feeling with people I love and respect--my Sinhala teacher, for one. He's one of my favorite people here; constantly happy, overjoyed when you (I) learn anything, easy to make laugh, sympathetic, infectiously enthusiastic about any experiences or insights you (I) have. I don't like to talk politics with him because I know he actually believes the plan for regional devolution of governmental powers is a ploy orchestrated by the LTTE to start a separate country. He supports the Wack President. He's not entirely wrong though...
It's a case where both sides, the Government and the LTTE, have broken so many rules, so many expectations, so many agreements--so many times--that a stalemate seems like the only possible solution. People are exhausted, and the merits of "peace" as opposed to "no war" (significant difference; one involves a settlement and disarmament) are not well understood and not desirable to all.
Case in point: a major incentive to peace, under the previous government, was that development, investment by international corporations and funding from nongovernmental sources would simply flood the economy once a strong ceasefire held up and progress was apparent in negotiations. For many reasons, including that the Wack Prez dissolved the government as is her wont and habit, that didn't happen. Poor folks stayed poor, and rich folks didn't suffer, and the prices of rice and petrol keep rising. Suddenly peace is irrelevant and expensive and detrimental to (many) people's vision of a strong nation, because we've got to Compromise, Settle, Share Power. This is after all a socialist country and folks expect the government to Provide. A government that is engaged in a negotiated attrition of power isn't one focused on getting the bread (rice) on the table (banana leaf) and the monks in the temples.
In some ways they were right. Development isn't guaranteed or even likely to help the poorest people's economic woes, and will probably exacerbate their perceived poverty by elevating the attractiveness of consumer goods and Western values. A country as proud of its history (disputed as that history is) and culture (divisive as that culture is) as this one had better be careful about what is getting imported along with all those potential jobs. The newspapers, even the better ones, are chock-full-o'-editorials about the need for a return to Lankan values.
Those values, as I am fond of pondering while enjoying my third teatime of the day, really have something going on: respect for family and leisure time, disregard for making a lot of money or getting ahead, devotion to personal life and introspection. Sri Lankans are not workaholics or greedy or ignorant, in ways that are inconsistent with how many of them are undereducated or unexposed to the world. Their values really are worthwhile, and certainly for me, a good antidote to the anxious frenzied individualistic cults of Amerika.
Enough political/psychological rambling. I can only hope that the ceasefire holds and the stalemate at least continues if not improves. Martyr's Day, I'm having a tea/cocktail party. Unrelatedly.
Has anyone read A Room With a View? It's so good. Unfortunately it's short. I watched "Mona Lisa Smile" yesterday and was disappointed by how little I found to criticize in it; was hoping for more covert feminism-bashing and censure of female liberation even as the movie sought to promote it. It seemed pretty nuanced and unobvious, except for the part where Julia Stiles explains her desire to Really Be a Housewife, in this stupidstupidstupid fakey Boston Brahmin accent. The synchro scene was far too short, as well.
and, for some laughs--
topics for possible descriptive analysis: vote for your favorite! these are all funny but Old News.
1. My two stalkers, by the names of "Sham" and "Buddhi" (say it with me: Booty).
2. My career as a homewrecker has just begun.
3. My valiant efforts not to pay an exorbitant Rs.600/ a month to use the friggin' library.
You just can't make this stuff up.
11.24.2004
Good Taste is its Own Punishment
or it is laziness and greed?
Waiting for the page to load. Waiting for the page to load.
Oh, there was that little bit of chocolate left from dessert--three squares of Lindt; what's the harm in that?
Stand up. Attempt to walk around desk.
Snag pants on edge of open metal drawer. Raise small welt on leg and RIP MOST COMFORTABLE PANTS IN THE WORLD!
...or at least, the most comfortable pants that I own and can wear publicly. Somehow wearing scrubs on the street in Kandy just doesn't command the kind of respect that scrub-clad people in stateside metropoli usually get. I'll just have to mend them. (In the middle of the fabric! augh! They'll never be decent enough to attend Embassy functions again!)
In other food news, dinner was borderline. I made tofu (plus) with broccoli (plus) and other veg (meh.) in a spicy (yes) sesame (yes) garlic (yes) curry leaf (NO NO NO) sauce. This all after another exhausting yoga class. My shoulder is really causing me problems and I ought really to a) get a bag that's not exacerbating the asymmetry of my back and b) find a chiropractor. Both of these are difficult-to-impossible.
Working theory about why yoga makes me almost-cry every time:
1. Janaka is a tyrant and will come and shove you around into the proper positions. Ow.
2. I keep stress and sadness in my lower back and/or hamstrings and therefore any stretching releases difficult feelings.
3. I have my period, and last week I was revving up for it, and the first week I was really really out of shape.
4. Some part of me can't handle the fact that I am arguably the worst student in the class, and certainly the only one who can't do backbend-pushups.
(5. I keep having what I can only assume are stress dreams where I am infinitely flexible. Could someone analyze this in a nonobvious way for me?)
I'll get around to outlining the grand tour of Dad and Kathleen ("my parents" to bloody half of the country; sorry Mom, remind me to tell you about "stepmother" in Sinhala) tomorrow or so. I have many tasks to do and one of them is have Sinhala class at 8:30 tomorrow for which the homework is not done. I should also describe this dream I had:
Star Wars + Stargate + The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman) + pirates + complicated semiotics of color + Cirque du Soleil + ancient ruins in Sri Lanka
yup.
or it is laziness and greed?
Waiting for the page to load. Waiting for the page to load.
Oh, there was that little bit of chocolate left from dessert--three squares of Lindt; what's the harm in that?
Stand up. Attempt to walk around desk.
Snag pants on edge of open metal drawer. Raise small welt on leg and RIP MOST COMFORTABLE PANTS IN THE WORLD!
...or at least, the most comfortable pants that I own and can wear publicly. Somehow wearing scrubs on the street in Kandy just doesn't command the kind of respect that scrub-clad people in stateside metropoli usually get. I'll just have to mend them. (In the middle of the fabric! augh! They'll never be decent enough to attend Embassy functions again!)
In other food news, dinner was borderline. I made tofu (plus) with broccoli (plus) and other veg (meh.) in a spicy (yes) sesame (yes) garlic (yes) curry leaf (NO NO NO) sauce. This all after another exhausting yoga class. My shoulder is really causing me problems and I ought really to a) get a bag that's not exacerbating the asymmetry of my back and b) find a chiropractor. Both of these are difficult-to-impossible.
Working theory about why yoga makes me almost-cry every time:
1. Janaka is a tyrant and will come and shove you around into the proper positions. Ow.
2. I keep stress and sadness in my lower back and/or hamstrings and therefore any stretching releases difficult feelings.
3. I have my period, and last week I was revving up for it, and the first week I was really really out of shape.
4. Some part of me can't handle the fact that I am arguably the worst student in the class, and certainly the only one who can't do backbend-pushups.
(5. I keep having what I can only assume are stress dreams where I am infinitely flexible. Could someone analyze this in a nonobvious way for me?)
I'll get around to outlining the grand tour of Dad and Kathleen ("my parents" to bloody half of the country; sorry Mom, remind me to tell you about "stepmother" in Sinhala) tomorrow or so. I have many tasks to do and one of them is have Sinhala class at 8:30 tomorrow for which the homework is not done. I should also describe this dream I had:
Star Wars + Stargate + The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman) + pirates + complicated semiotics of color + Cirque du Soleil + ancient ruins in Sri Lanka
yup.
11.10.2004
Packaging Antics
"Fried Salted Jumbo Peanuts
If you're nuts over peanuts, here's something to make you even nuttier!
A nutty appetizer--A nutty picnic companion--Your child's nutty friend--Makes family times nuttier
The Oxygen absorber keeps foods fresh. Do not eat."
One packet peanuts: Rs.21/
Entertainment: priceless!
Now imagine the four 'nutty' phrases illustrated with scary line drawings.
I want to be someone's nutty friend.
"Fried Salted Jumbo Peanuts
If you're nuts over peanuts, here's something to make you even nuttier!
A nutty appetizer--A nutty picnic companion--Your child's nutty friend--Makes family times nuttier
The Oxygen absorber keeps foods fresh. Do not eat."
One packet peanuts: Rs.21/
Entertainment: priceless!
Now imagine the four 'nutty' phrases illustrated with scary line drawings.
I want to be someone's nutty friend.
Where My Hip-Openers At?
I finally found a yoga class! And went to it, and it kicked my ass. In a good way. I am extremely sore today. It’s at a hotel above the lake in Kandy and in a lovely space which just happens to be a sort of large hallway enroute to a bunch of the hotel’s rooms. We yogaed intensively with random people walking through at times. The teacher, Janaka, focuses on backward-bending stuff, which is the bitter medicine I need. I do find myself yearning for Swarthmore Power Yoga, on squishy mats, breathing aggressively, with plentiful “hip-openers.” It just doesn’t feel like yoga without at least ten minutes of Pigeon poses.
Janaka introduced me to his [English] wife Billy, who apparently has been living in Sri Lanka fo-eva. They have two adorable kids. They make a great pair, in some literary sense; he has a lazy eye (like, really really lazy) and she has/had a cleft palate. She looks and sounds like Wendolene from “A Close Shave,” but pretty. What accent is that anyway? Aaron, you reading this?
They gave me a ride down to Kandy-town where I purchased, among other sundries, carrot-based “vegetable sausages.” They were pretty good with soup (what else? As predicted, I cook nothing but) for dinner. The sausage package didn’t have an ingredients list so I can only hope they weren’t meaty somewhere deep inside. Didn’t taste like it.
Am trying to plan Dad and Kathleen’s trip and I keep running up against the problem that living here and visiting here are really really different things. I have to figure out how to show them as much stuff as possible without making the whole trip a mad scramble from place to place. My instinct is to allow leisurely chillin’ but of course Kathleen isn’t much one for that. Mad scramble it is, then.
One thought about cockroaches: why do they bother me so much in the kitchen and not at all outside the house? I have now successfully removed two from the premises (though one hung around, yearning for my company, I think) and each time found myself horrified to discover them but totally indifferent once I had got them out the door. Pinker writes about the evolutionary usefulness of a stomach-turning response to grossness and I know what he means; it’s a revulsion I feel almost on a cellular level.
Why can't I write an internally coherent blog?
I finally found a yoga class! And went to it, and it kicked my ass. In a good way. I am extremely sore today. It’s at a hotel above the lake in Kandy and in a lovely space which just happens to be a sort of large hallway enroute to a bunch of the hotel’s rooms. We yogaed intensively with random people walking through at times. The teacher, Janaka, focuses on backward-bending stuff, which is the bitter medicine I need. I do find myself yearning for Swarthmore Power Yoga, on squishy mats, breathing aggressively, with plentiful “hip-openers.” It just doesn’t feel like yoga without at least ten minutes of Pigeon poses.
Janaka introduced me to his [English] wife Billy, who apparently has been living in Sri Lanka fo-eva. They have two adorable kids. They make a great pair, in some literary sense; he has a lazy eye (like, really really lazy) and she has/had a cleft palate. She looks and sounds like Wendolene from “A Close Shave,” but pretty. What accent is that anyway? Aaron, you reading this?
They gave me a ride down to Kandy-town where I purchased, among other sundries, carrot-based “vegetable sausages.” They were pretty good with soup (what else? As predicted, I cook nothing but) for dinner. The sausage package didn’t have an ingredients list so I can only hope they weren’t meaty somewhere deep inside. Didn’t taste like it.
Am trying to plan Dad and Kathleen’s trip and I keep running up against the problem that living here and visiting here are really really different things. I have to figure out how to show them as much stuff as possible without making the whole trip a mad scramble from place to place. My instinct is to allow leisurely chillin’ but of course Kathleen isn’t much one for that. Mad scramble it is, then.
One thought about cockroaches: why do they bother me so much in the kitchen and not at all outside the house? I have now successfully removed two from the premises (though one hung around, yearning for my company, I think) and each time found myself horrified to discover them but totally indifferent once I had got them out the door. Pinker writes about the evolutionary usefulness of a stomach-turning response to grossness and I know what he means; it’s a revulsion I feel almost on a cellular level.
Why can't I write an internally coherent blog?
11.08.2004
Sorry, Mom, but you're just too wonderful
from this morning's email:
<<
it's been a long day, i'm still not jiggy with the new time, and after a week of poor sleeping because of the time change, i'm exhaustamundo.
(did i use the term 'jiggy' correctly?? i hope it doesn't mean anything to do w/sex... but i just can't recall if it has wider ranging uses... ah, sleep).
>>
Yes, you've used it correctly. Yes, it does have to do with sex, but only in a mild way. (Comments, assorted slang-observant peeps?) Hope your 'exhaustamundo' abates and I promise not to put more of your charming emails on here...too often at least.
from this morning's email:
<<
it's been a long day, i'm still not jiggy with the new time, and after a week of poor sleeping because of the time change, i'm exhaustamundo.
(did i use the term 'jiggy' correctly?? i hope it doesn't mean anything to do w/sex... but i just can't recall if it has wider ranging uses... ah, sleep).
>>
Yes, you've used it correctly. Yes, it does have to do with sex, but only in a mild way. (Comments, assorted slang-observant peeps?) Hope your 'exhaustamundo' abates and I promise not to put more of your charming emails on here...too often at least.
Bush honday naeae!
Sinhala pantiya goDDak amaruy, needa?
This morning was one of those extended arising sessions that make you feel like you barely slept. I woke up at 6.25 and spent the next hour-plus waking up every ten minutes and thinking, oh, I can go back to sleep. When 8 rolled around* I hauled myself out of bed to find a beautiful day outside and hustled through a shower in order to be presentable for my 8.30 Sinhala lesson.
Two years ago I had two Sinhala teachers, Kamini and Herath. Kamini is a 70+ year old super-strict hilarious aristocratic Anglophile woman who’s taught several decades’ worth of diplomatic folks; Herath is a jolly and avuncular** fellow whose speech in both languages is characterized by a lot of excited exclamations and unfeigned shock. He’s awesome and I’m so happy to have private lessons with him.
Our lesson today consisted of three short paragraphs in Sinhala which I would read to him and then slowly translate and discuss. The topics today were ‘Rain,’ ‘Walking,’ and ‘Fruits.’ I feel I should offer a translation so that you-all will get a sense of where my language skills are at:
Rain
These days it rains from time to time. It’s hard to say what time it will rain. Because of that, you always want to keep an umbrella in your hand. Some days it rains from morning until evening. It won’t dry up even a little.
Walking
My house is a bit far away. Therefore, I can’t walk every day. But, walking is very good exercise—although if you do it every day you will get tired of it. So some days I go by three-wheeler. From town to my house the driver will take fifty rupees. That’s not a big amount.
Fruits
In Sri Lanka there are a lot of kinds of fruit. Some types of fruit are very tasty. They grow in the dry zone (ed: not the mountains). The dry zone fruits are very tasty. I like mango, woodapple, pear, and anoda type fruits a lot. But those are a bit sour. It’s hard to eat them if they’re not ripe. You can eat some types of fruit when they’re unripe. Kids often like to eat sour mangoes (ed: me too!). You can’t eat anoda or durian type fruits when they’re unripe.
My conversations are, shall we say, limited. I have noticed since the election that my Sinhala is perfect to express my opinions on American politics: “Bush is bad for all the people—American people and Sri Lankan people both. He says he will care for the people but he does not. He is always telling lies. He takes money from poor people and gives it to rich people. He makes a big war and because of that the schools are broken and the people suffer. It would be better if we had a monkey for President.” Any more complicated views I have are really just commentary on this elegantly succinct phrase: “Bush is a bad man.” (vide title!)
*It never before occurred to me that a time ‘rolling around’ is a phrase particularly suited to describing those old-school ‘digital’ clocks where the numbers are on little strips of plastic and they flip over, or the ones on actual rollers which turn. It’s pretty stupid to describe such a thing on a fully digital clock where the time lights up…
**it doesn’t sound like it, Mr. Kholawitski.
Sinhala pantiya goDDak amaruy, needa?
This morning was one of those extended arising sessions that make you feel like you barely slept. I woke up at 6.25 and spent the next hour-plus waking up every ten minutes and thinking, oh, I can go back to sleep. When 8 rolled around* I hauled myself out of bed to find a beautiful day outside and hustled through a shower in order to be presentable for my 8.30 Sinhala lesson.
Two years ago I had two Sinhala teachers, Kamini and Herath. Kamini is a 70+ year old super-strict hilarious aristocratic Anglophile woman who’s taught several decades’ worth of diplomatic folks; Herath is a jolly and avuncular** fellow whose speech in both languages is characterized by a lot of excited exclamations and unfeigned shock. He’s awesome and I’m so happy to have private lessons with him.
Our lesson today consisted of three short paragraphs in Sinhala which I would read to him and then slowly translate and discuss. The topics today were ‘Rain,’ ‘Walking,’ and ‘Fruits.’ I feel I should offer a translation so that you-all will get a sense of where my language skills are at:
Rain
These days it rains from time to time. It’s hard to say what time it will rain. Because of that, you always want to keep an umbrella in your hand. Some days it rains from morning until evening. It won’t dry up even a little.
Walking
My house is a bit far away. Therefore, I can’t walk every day. But, walking is very good exercise—although if you do it every day you will get tired of it. So some days I go by three-wheeler. From town to my house the driver will take fifty rupees. That’s not a big amount.
Fruits
In Sri Lanka there are a lot of kinds of fruit. Some types of fruit are very tasty. They grow in the dry zone (ed: not the mountains). The dry zone fruits are very tasty. I like mango, woodapple, pear, and anoda type fruits a lot. But those are a bit sour. It’s hard to eat them if they’re not ripe. You can eat some types of fruit when they’re unripe. Kids often like to eat sour mangoes (ed: me too!). You can’t eat anoda or durian type fruits when they’re unripe.
My conversations are, shall we say, limited. I have noticed since the election that my Sinhala is perfect to express my opinions on American politics: “Bush is bad for all the people—American people and Sri Lankan people both. He says he will care for the people but he does not. He is always telling lies. He takes money from poor people and gives it to rich people. He makes a big war and because of that the schools are broken and the people suffer. It would be better if we had a monkey for President.” Any more complicated views I have are really just commentary on this elegantly succinct phrase: “Bush is a bad man.” (vide title!)
*It never before occurred to me that a time ‘rolling around’ is a phrase particularly suited to describing those old-school ‘digital’ clocks where the numbers are on little strips of plastic and they flip over, or the ones on actual rollers which turn. It’s pretty stupid to describe such a thing on a fully digital clock where the time lights up…
**it doesn’t sound like it, Mr. Kholawitski.
Constructive Escapism: Vol. X
I'm so thankful for weekends
So I went to the beach, and then to Colombo for to watch the election. Was out about a week and now that I’m back it’s the weekend and I can’t get anything done except copious reading of election analysis, which is pretty pointless: Phil Frayne, the head of the cultural wing of the Embassy, told me on Thursday, ‘you can read all the articles you want, but Bush will still have won.’ Phil’s a nice guy; excellent taste in suits though he looks like a tall young Jewish Richard Nixon. He also has a lisp, for those of you who know what that means. He’s the official chair of the Fulbright board so technically he’s my uber-boss or something, but he has pretty much nothing to do with us.
Anyway it’s been a while and I feel I’ve got to say something about my travels and thoughts. After this much time who cares about chronicling stuff—especially as the stuff fades in memory and emotions which were so strong at the time of their presence come to seem faintly quaint in retrospect.
Case in point: I cried three times during the election returns on Wednesday. By Thursday morning when I woke up I was pretty resigned. Since then my shame-fear stuff has more or less abated into crusty, prickly, angry, rueful indignation.
Side note: shame-fear is an important Sri Lankan concept; called ‘lajja-baya’ in Sinhala, it’s the essential quality that keeps people in line socially. It’s sort of like embarrassment to the nth degree—encompassing shyness, and respect for social norms, and fear of being singled out or noticed for one’s behaviour.
Actually the election made me the opposite of lajja-baya; it put me over the edge a bit, in terms of proper comportment. I had zero patience for the usual bullshit like guys catcalling on the street. Instead of ignoring them (a constant thing) I went around Colombo swearing at men. I realized that this was going in a bad direction when I told two on-duty, uniformed policemen to go fuck themselves. The police are wildly unprofessional here—as in, they were leering at me instead of directing traffic—so you don’t want to mess with them, and they’re no help in a crisis. I reined it in after that.
Sometimes I think that’s why they’ve had so much damn civil unrest here, from the LTTE war to the socialist-youth uprisings of the 50s, 70s, 80s… the culture doesn’t allow forceful individuality, and isn’t peacefully communalist like, say, America. (No, I really believe that!) So instead of people expressing themselves and joining together to work out problems, they are really nice and restrained all the time, and privately harbor all kinds of hateful prejudices, even the ‘liberals.’ Women in particular have little daily outlet for the anger that comes with being subtly socially oppressed, as with this harassment thing.
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here. Sri Lankan public life is essentially different from American/Western public life in this huge, paradoxically unobvious way: here there is comparatively little ‘public space’ in terms of parks, cafes, museums, restaurants, etc. I mean, all those things exist; they just don’t get the kind of use that we think of. Imagine Copley Plaza: people hang around casually, they get coffees at Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, they sit on benches, meet their friends, and so forth. In Sri Lanka the public facilities (like parks) are not in good repair and the food outlets are places to eat, not social places. (Most people don’t talk while eating, it’s not a social occasion.) You would never just stop by the park or at a shop on your way home from work—the social world is structured around being at home or visiting friends at their homes or maybe among elites making shopping/eating plans together. I’m exaggerating here, but not hugely. Society is just that much more formal.
How this relates to the female-harassment thing is as follows. Since there is so little public life, it follows that anyone out on the roads in public must have a reason to be there: you’re enroute someplace, you’ve got a meeting or an errand. A woman’s place is in the home or taking care of children or working at certain types of jobs. If you’re not demonstrably doing one of those things (ie you’re walking, not with kids, not wearing a sari or business clothes, young, reasonably attractive, alone…) you’re outside propriety and respect. Especially foreigners are liable to get whistled at or spoken to, because of money—why are you walking? Why aren’t you in a car with a driver? Being in a car, besides giving you an actual spatial boundary, also indicates that you know your place in society classwise.
Blah blah blah.
So, right: I’ve just returned from dinner at Jill’s house with one of the Phantom Phulbrighters, people who are on the email lists but no one has met. He seems like a cool guy—ISLE ’99, doing a PhD in Buddhism at UVA, speaks Tamil as well as Sinhala, doesn’t cook. We made rice and curry (big shock there) and it was good. This after a day of neighborhood activities: working on photo uploading (look, look! at the links list!) and visiting my tailor friend twice (running out of Sinhala both times) and boiling water for later consumption (and spilling a full kettle of it on my kitchen floor). Two steps forward, one step back. My host family seems to have flown the coop. Usually when they go out of town they have someone come stay at the house to babysit it, but no one was there all day. (I can see into their front yard from my verandah.)
I tired. More about the beach and the fiasco later.
Oh, those pictures—take a look.
The ones of me are trying to convey my current haircut. Did I blog about that? No? Well, it took an hour and a half in a very posh Colombo salon and was incredibly masterful and precise and delicate. After all that I barely do anything to it vis-à-vis styling.
The ones of the apartment are from when I first moved in; I have more junk now but it’s still pretty spare. I can’t figure out how to photograph the place well, but believe me, it’s lovely. I didn’t upload the photo of the square toilet, you’ll have to just imagine it.
The peeps are as follows: the two girls are Jill (in black) and Malka (in pink), my best girlies here; the sunset is us drinking cocktails on the patio at the fancy schmancy Galle Face Hotel the night before the election (the sun represents the falling/failing light of democracy), and the group is, from left, Samir Lori Malka Jeremy Jill Tod. They are the other Juniors—Lisa is missing, as is Gavin. That was post-tasty-Thai in the lead-up to the apocalypse. I took only a few post-apocalypse and I’ll spare you the good times. There were drinks in hands, let it be known.
Someone write me an email please… now that I have internet at home I am starting to check it, like, three times a day. It’s like college!
I'm so thankful for weekends
So I went to the beach, and then to Colombo for to watch the election. Was out about a week and now that I’m back it’s the weekend and I can’t get anything done except copious reading of election analysis, which is pretty pointless: Phil Frayne, the head of the cultural wing of the Embassy, told me on Thursday, ‘you can read all the articles you want, but Bush will still have won.’ Phil’s a nice guy; excellent taste in suits though he looks like a tall young Jewish Richard Nixon. He also has a lisp, for those of you who know what that means. He’s the official chair of the Fulbright board so technically he’s my uber-boss or something, but he has pretty much nothing to do with us.
Anyway it’s been a while and I feel I’ve got to say something about my travels and thoughts. After this much time who cares about chronicling stuff—especially as the stuff fades in memory and emotions which were so strong at the time of their presence come to seem faintly quaint in retrospect.
Case in point: I cried three times during the election returns on Wednesday. By Thursday morning when I woke up I was pretty resigned. Since then my shame-fear stuff has more or less abated into crusty, prickly, angry, rueful indignation.
Side note: shame-fear is an important Sri Lankan concept; called ‘lajja-baya’ in Sinhala, it’s the essential quality that keeps people in line socially. It’s sort of like embarrassment to the nth degree—encompassing shyness, and respect for social norms, and fear of being singled out or noticed for one’s behaviour.
Actually the election made me the opposite of lajja-baya; it put me over the edge a bit, in terms of proper comportment. I had zero patience for the usual bullshit like guys catcalling on the street. Instead of ignoring them (a constant thing) I went around Colombo swearing at men. I realized that this was going in a bad direction when I told two on-duty, uniformed policemen to go fuck themselves. The police are wildly unprofessional here—as in, they were leering at me instead of directing traffic—so you don’t want to mess with them, and they’re no help in a crisis. I reined it in after that.
Sometimes I think that’s why they’ve had so much damn civil unrest here, from the LTTE war to the socialist-youth uprisings of the 50s, 70s, 80s… the culture doesn’t allow forceful individuality, and isn’t peacefully communalist like, say, America. (No, I really believe that!) So instead of people expressing themselves and joining together to work out problems, they are really nice and restrained all the time, and privately harbor all kinds of hateful prejudices, even the ‘liberals.’ Women in particular have little daily outlet for the anger that comes with being subtly socially oppressed, as with this harassment thing.
It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here. Sri Lankan public life is essentially different from American/Western public life in this huge, paradoxically unobvious way: here there is comparatively little ‘public space’ in terms of parks, cafes, museums, restaurants, etc. I mean, all those things exist; they just don’t get the kind of use that we think of. Imagine Copley Plaza: people hang around casually, they get coffees at Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts, they sit on benches, meet their friends, and so forth. In Sri Lanka the public facilities (like parks) are not in good repair and the food outlets are places to eat, not social places. (Most people don’t talk while eating, it’s not a social occasion.) You would never just stop by the park or at a shop on your way home from work—the social world is structured around being at home or visiting friends at their homes or maybe among elites making shopping/eating plans together. I’m exaggerating here, but not hugely. Society is just that much more formal.
How this relates to the female-harassment thing is as follows. Since there is so little public life, it follows that anyone out on the roads in public must have a reason to be there: you’re enroute someplace, you’ve got a meeting or an errand. A woman’s place is in the home or taking care of children or working at certain types of jobs. If you’re not demonstrably doing one of those things (ie you’re walking, not with kids, not wearing a sari or business clothes, young, reasonably attractive, alone…) you’re outside propriety and respect. Especially foreigners are liable to get whistled at or spoken to, because of money—why are you walking? Why aren’t you in a car with a driver? Being in a car, besides giving you an actual spatial boundary, also indicates that you know your place in society classwise.
Blah blah blah.
So, right: I’ve just returned from dinner at Jill’s house with one of the Phantom Phulbrighters, people who are on the email lists but no one has met. He seems like a cool guy—ISLE ’99, doing a PhD in Buddhism at UVA, speaks Tamil as well as Sinhala, doesn’t cook. We made rice and curry (big shock there) and it was good. This after a day of neighborhood activities: working on photo uploading (look, look! at the links list!) and visiting my tailor friend twice (running out of Sinhala both times) and boiling water for later consumption (and spilling a full kettle of it on my kitchen floor). Two steps forward, one step back. My host family seems to have flown the coop. Usually when they go out of town they have someone come stay at the house to babysit it, but no one was there all day. (I can see into their front yard from my verandah.)
I tired. More about the beach and the fiasco later.
Oh, those pictures—take a look.
The ones of me are trying to convey my current haircut. Did I blog about that? No? Well, it took an hour and a half in a very posh Colombo salon and was incredibly masterful and precise and delicate. After all that I barely do anything to it vis-à-vis styling.
The ones of the apartment are from when I first moved in; I have more junk now but it’s still pretty spare. I can’t figure out how to photograph the place well, but believe me, it’s lovely. I didn’t upload the photo of the square toilet, you’ll have to just imagine it.
The peeps are as follows: the two girls are Jill (in black) and Malka (in pink), my best girlies here; the sunset is us drinking cocktails on the patio at the fancy schmancy Galle Face Hotel the night before the election (the sun represents the falling/failing light of democracy), and the group is, from left, Samir Lori Malka Jeremy Jill Tod. They are the other Juniors—Lisa is missing, as is Gavin. That was post-tasty-Thai in the lead-up to the apocalypse. I took only a few post-apocalypse and I’ll spare you the good times. There were drinks in hands, let it be known.
Someone write me an email please… now that I have internet at home I am starting to check it, like, three times a day. It’s like college!
11.06.2004
11.03.2004
It's 2:17 pm in Colombo on November 3rd...
I will try to write later (once I get back to Kandy ie) about the Embassy election party and my preceding trip to the beach (niiiice) but right now all I can think of is the utter shame and fear that are accompanying the election returns for me.
After a tense six hours I don't know what to think. The popular vote alone is enough to turn my stomach--how can people believe in him? Vote for him? Agree with what he's been doing and promises to do? Is this the death knell of the Democratic Party? Is this America?
I will try to write later (once I get back to Kandy ie) about the Embassy election party and my preceding trip to the beach (niiiice) but right now all I can think of is the utter shame and fear that are accompanying the election returns for me.
After a tense six hours I don't know what to think. The popular vote alone is enough to turn my stomach--how can people believe in him? Vote for him? Agree with what he's been doing and promises to do? Is this the death knell of the Democratic Party? Is this America?
10.28.2004
I had a clever title all worked out
but now I've forgotten it. What to do?
Am in a hurry to get some lunch and get some work done, but hopefully tonight I can get the computer up and running and on the net. Hopefully, I say, because it will take hope and perhaps prayer and probably cursing too to get the thing going. (Yester-afternoon I tried and for my efforts got a zap from the wall socket. Aiyo!)
But: I have a home! I even slept there! It has hot water and a phone and a decent kitchen (although no propane quite yet) with a biggish fridge and a 2-burner cooker and cupboards and things. My "business-minded" landlady gave me kitchen things--one each cup, saucer, big glass, small glass, plate, bowl, side plate, pot, pan, knife. Therefore I'm engaged in the fun task of shopping for housewares. Today I scored a fancy computer protector (UPS), some speakers, some plastic thingies for keeping ants out of the biscuits and sugar, a cutting board. Yesterday I spent about 40 minutes buying groceries and had a small saga of trying to get a trishaw in the rain to take me home with my passel of stuff. I spent Rs.3500 for about six bags of stuff--that's ridiculous, I know.
You all can now call me, for real!
home: (oo-94) o81-447-5523
mobile: (00-94) 077-311-5531
or write, c/o ICES Kandy, 554/6A Peradeniya Rd, Kandy, Sri Lanka
Anyway. Off to work.
but now I've forgotten it. What to do?
Am in a hurry to get some lunch and get some work done, but hopefully tonight I can get the computer up and running and on the net. Hopefully, I say, because it will take hope and perhaps prayer and probably cursing too to get the thing going. (Yester-afternoon I tried and for my efforts got a zap from the wall socket. Aiyo!)
But: I have a home! I even slept there! It has hot water and a phone and a decent kitchen (although no propane quite yet) with a biggish fridge and a 2-burner cooker and cupboards and things. My "business-minded" landlady gave me kitchen things--one each cup, saucer, big glass, small glass, plate, bowl, side plate, pot, pan, knife. Therefore I'm engaged in the fun task of shopping for housewares. Today I scored a fancy computer protector (UPS), some speakers, some plastic thingies for keeping ants out of the biscuits and sugar, a cutting board. Yesterday I spent about 40 minutes buying groceries and had a small saga of trying to get a trishaw in the rain to take me home with my passel of stuff. I spent Rs.3500 for about six bags of stuff--that's ridiculous, I know.
You all can now call me, for real!
home: (oo-94) o81-447-5523
mobile: (00-94) 077-311-5531
or write, c/o ICES Kandy, 554/6A Peradeniya Rd, Kandy, Sri Lanka
Anyway. Off to work.
10.24.2004
Hedonism in the Big City
This is my first attempt at writing an entry from my computer at home and uploading it off disk at the internet café. With any luck the formatting won’t be insane.
After many errands and adventures enroute, Jill and I made it to Colombo on Wednesday. Notably I was met at the train in Kandy twenty minutes before it left by my mobile-phone agent (who is an assistant professor at Peradeniya; shows you how well they are paid) on a motorcycle with my new phone. He promptly zoomed off to get the connection chip for the phone and returned, as promised, ten minutes later and ten minutes before we departed, phone in hand. Of course the phone doesn’t work yet—that would be too easy!—but it’s nice to have it, look at it, whatever.
The trains here run very much on time, at least vis-à-vis departures. It’s one of the few left-over British things. Well, there’s a lot of left-over British things, but most of those have been adopted and changed to a remarkable degree, whereas the trains’ timeliness is nothing less than shocking in a country where, for example, “I will be back in my office after lunch” can mean “I will be back in my office the next day which is technically after lunch today”.
The train itself is pretty pleasant, especially in first class where they don’t sell “open” tickets and therefore there isn’t a whole passel of folks standing up in the aisles. When the train pulls into the station to load up (about an hour before it is leaving generally!) all the people in third class run, jump, and shove their way into the cars, because they are the least likely to get seats. Then you sit on the platform and wait and wait and buy little cups of Nescafe and packets of biscuits from the guy trundling a cart up and down the platform. It’s tiring, even though one is sitting down.
Colombo is generally tiring. The only way I can explain how expats and rich people live a jet-setting kind of life is that they have cars and drivers and always go from one clean, posh, air-conditioned place to another. When I am in Colombo I am generally hot, dirty, and wilting from the combination. I catch glimpses of myself in shiny surfaces and think, who is that frazzled girl?
This time Jill and I agreed that in the interests of getting-things-done efficiently and not feeling totally rushed all the time (ha), we would forgo the elaborate process of walking and taking buses to save money and just take trishaws whenever necessary. This proved expensive by Sri Lankan standards but cheap by the standards of, say, the New York City subway system. It’s sobering to think that for the price of a ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan you can get from Kandy to Colombo in first class. Trishaws are relatively expensive—Rs.150 for rides of a moderate length—but oh so handy.
We did many important errands, including going to the Fulbright Commission to get mah money. I never got my first month’s check, which means I’ve been making it on the settling-in allowance, which is less than a month’s pay, and I’ve spent less than half of it. We also ran into our pal Bill, who is a Senior Fulby English professor. He’s working in the middle of nowhere and has had a hard time so far—they keep asking him to teach a class with about half an hour’s notice, and stuff like that. He is incredibly good natured and funny and smart about it though, so I can see him being really happy once the bullshit gets sorted out.
We also went to the Embassy to check out the commissary store, where they sell all kinds of American foods and stuff that it’s hard to get here. The store is cute and vaguely pathetic—neat little rows of Jello and Tide, you know—but enticing at moments. They have Ghirardelli chocolate chips and four kinds of mustard (French’s, something else yellow, Grey Poupon in a squeeze bottle, Grey Poupon in a jar) and totally tax-free booze. 1-litre bottles of Tanqueray for $10. You have to pay to join the store, so Jill and I gave it a pass. We were going to be schlepping around all day anyway. Judy and Yvonne have joined already and promised to get me some Grey at some point…
The purpose of the Embassy trip was really to VOTE! It was anticlimactic but very bureaucratic; many little forms and envelopes to stick’n’seal and slips of paper. I hope desperately that the vote is far enough towards Kerry that they never even think of opening the absentee ballots (they don’t unless the volume of such ballots could possibly swing the state). We made it into the diplomatic pouch by about an hour. The consular section folks were extremely pleasant and chatty. You get this funny perspective on “Americans” when the only Americans you see are academics and diplomats; everyone is so friendly, and helpful, and interested in what you’re doing. The State Department certainly has the right people overseas…
After Business came Pleasure, which basically amounted to a lot of good old Colombo shopping. I made an appointment for a haircut at the poshest salon (or so I hear) in town: Fin(o)men-aL. I can’t really do it justice because the name is supposed to be covered with weird diacritical markings and the letters are not supposed to be in line with each other. Anyway before doing that we went from Crescat Boulevard (super posh mall) to Odel Unlimited (super posh old-school ‘department’ style store) and shopped in the cheap section. Odel is where you get the Banana Republic linen pants for $9, which I did. Their store is a wacky paradise of fancy stuff; a Lush store, a sushi bar, a Delifrance, handicrafts, eveningwear, designer labels, Western beauty products… and… a gelateria. Jill and I bought a monster takeout styrofoam container of gelato and, pleasure of pleasures, took it to the Embassy pool complex.
There we met Jeremy, who had finally purchased a floor lamp for his house and was lugging it around proudly. We swam and ate gelato from the container. We tried to feed some to the ambassador and his wife, who were there a'swimmin' as is their habit in the early evening. I went off for my (severe, artistic) haircut.
The haircut deserves a long entry all it's own but as I'm finishing this one up in the net-cafe itself I'll abstain for the moment. Suffice it to say that it was the most elaborate haircutting process ever and I have almost no hair anymore. I like it. After the haircut I met J&J for a fancy Indian dinner at our boss's favorite restaurant. Friday we dashed around, back to the Commission, to Barefoot (chichi fabric and housewares and clothing store) for shopping and falafel lunch, then off to the train...
...where we had not bought tickets for the express and so had to w-a-i-t in the heat and dirt for the next one. We finally got back to Kandy at 8:15 and I fell asleep in Jill's bed waiting for Judy and Yvonne to get home so I could go 'home' to their house. I dragged myself over there at 10 or so.
Saturday we slept late, made Bisquick pancakes, and spent the afternoon at Le Kandyan, a fancy hotel atop a mountain near Dangolla. Big buffet lunch, a quick swim as it was thunderstorming and we darted between bouts of rain, tea, relaxing with books, ogling the underdressed tourists. (And how!) What else could be more fun?
AND! Before I finish up--I have decided on an apartment. It's not all settled yet, but it will be tomorrow. It's 1-br, lovely with huge verandah and nice kitchen. All ye who are coming to visit, fear not; it is across the street from a nice cheap hotel and I am also getting a spare bed to stick in the living room. The kitchen and verandah more than make up for the non-having of a guest room. Besides, I'm going to move in February to a 2-br place. So come on down. (Up, if you're in Colombo.)
Oh, and my non-working cell phone is 077-311-5531. Country code is 94. Don't call until I say so. Then call. Often.
This is my first attempt at writing an entry from my computer at home and uploading it off disk at the internet café. With any luck the formatting won’t be insane.
After many errands and adventures enroute, Jill and I made it to Colombo on Wednesday. Notably I was met at the train in Kandy twenty minutes before it left by my mobile-phone agent (who is an assistant professor at Peradeniya; shows you how well they are paid) on a motorcycle with my new phone. He promptly zoomed off to get the connection chip for the phone and returned, as promised, ten minutes later and ten minutes before we departed, phone in hand. Of course the phone doesn’t work yet—that would be too easy!—but it’s nice to have it, look at it, whatever.
The trains here run very much on time, at least vis-à-vis departures. It’s one of the few left-over British things. Well, there’s a lot of left-over British things, but most of those have been adopted and changed to a remarkable degree, whereas the trains’ timeliness is nothing less than shocking in a country where, for example, “I will be back in my office after lunch” can mean “I will be back in my office the next day which is technically after lunch today”.
The train itself is pretty pleasant, especially in first class where they don’t sell “open” tickets and therefore there isn’t a whole passel of folks standing up in the aisles. When the train pulls into the station to load up (about an hour before it is leaving generally!) all the people in third class run, jump, and shove their way into the cars, because they are the least likely to get seats. Then you sit on the platform and wait and wait and buy little cups of Nescafe and packets of biscuits from the guy trundling a cart up and down the platform. It’s tiring, even though one is sitting down.
Colombo is generally tiring. The only way I can explain how expats and rich people live a jet-setting kind of life is that they have cars and drivers and always go from one clean, posh, air-conditioned place to another. When I am in Colombo I am generally hot, dirty, and wilting from the combination. I catch glimpses of myself in shiny surfaces and think, who is that frazzled girl?
This time Jill and I agreed that in the interests of getting-things-done efficiently and not feeling totally rushed all the time (ha), we would forgo the elaborate process of walking and taking buses to save money and just take trishaws whenever necessary. This proved expensive by Sri Lankan standards but cheap by the standards of, say, the New York City subway system. It’s sobering to think that for the price of a ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan you can get from Kandy to Colombo in first class. Trishaws are relatively expensive—Rs.150 for rides of a moderate length—but oh so handy.
We did many important errands, including going to the Fulbright Commission to get mah money. I never got my first month’s check, which means I’ve been making it on the settling-in allowance, which is less than a month’s pay, and I’ve spent less than half of it. We also ran into our pal Bill, who is a Senior Fulby English professor. He’s working in the middle of nowhere and has had a hard time so far—they keep asking him to teach a class with about half an hour’s notice, and stuff like that. He is incredibly good natured and funny and smart about it though, so I can see him being really happy once the bullshit gets sorted out.
We also went to the Embassy to check out the commissary store, where they sell all kinds of American foods and stuff that it’s hard to get here. The store is cute and vaguely pathetic—neat little rows of Jello and Tide, you know—but enticing at moments. They have Ghirardelli chocolate chips and four kinds of mustard (French’s, something else yellow, Grey Poupon in a squeeze bottle, Grey Poupon in a jar) and totally tax-free booze. 1-litre bottles of Tanqueray for $10. You have to pay to join the store, so Jill and I gave it a pass. We were going to be schlepping around all day anyway. Judy and Yvonne have joined already and promised to get me some Grey at some point…
The purpose of the Embassy trip was really to VOTE! It was anticlimactic but very bureaucratic; many little forms and envelopes to stick’n’seal and slips of paper. I hope desperately that the vote is far enough towards Kerry that they never even think of opening the absentee ballots (they don’t unless the volume of such ballots could possibly swing the state). We made it into the diplomatic pouch by about an hour. The consular section folks were extremely pleasant and chatty. You get this funny perspective on “Americans” when the only Americans you see are academics and diplomats; everyone is so friendly, and helpful, and interested in what you’re doing. The State Department certainly has the right people overseas…
After Business came Pleasure, which basically amounted to a lot of good old Colombo shopping. I made an appointment for a haircut at the poshest salon (or so I hear) in town: Fin(o)men-aL. I can’t really do it justice because the name is supposed to be covered with weird diacritical markings and the letters are not supposed to be in line with each other. Anyway before doing that we went from Crescat Boulevard (super posh mall) to Odel Unlimited (super posh old-school ‘department’ style store) and shopped in the cheap section. Odel is where you get the Banana Republic linen pants for $9, which I did. Their store is a wacky paradise of fancy stuff; a Lush store, a sushi bar, a Delifrance, handicrafts, eveningwear, designer labels, Western beauty products… and… a gelateria. Jill and I bought a monster takeout styrofoam container of gelato and, pleasure of pleasures, took it to the Embassy pool complex.
There we met Jeremy, who had finally purchased a floor lamp for his house and was lugging it around proudly. We swam and ate gelato from the container. We tried to feed some to the ambassador and his wife, who were there a'swimmin' as is their habit in the early evening. I went off for my (severe, artistic) haircut.
The haircut deserves a long entry all it's own but as I'm finishing this one up in the net-cafe itself I'll abstain for the moment. Suffice it to say that it was the most elaborate haircutting process ever and I have almost no hair anymore. I like it. After the haircut I met J&J for a fancy Indian dinner at our boss's favorite restaurant. Friday we dashed around, back to the Commission, to Barefoot (chichi fabric and housewares and clothing store) for shopping and falafel lunch, then off to the train...
...where we had not bought tickets for the express and so had to w-a-i-t in the heat and dirt for the next one. We finally got back to Kandy at 8:15 and I fell asleep in Jill's bed waiting for Judy and Yvonne to get home so I could go 'home' to their house. I dragged myself over there at 10 or so.
Saturday we slept late, made Bisquick pancakes, and spent the afternoon at Le Kandyan, a fancy hotel atop a mountain near Dangolla. Big buffet lunch, a quick swim as it was thunderstorming and we darted between bouts of rain, tea, relaxing with books, ogling the underdressed tourists. (And how!) What else could be more fun?
AND! Before I finish up--I have decided on an apartment. It's not all settled yet, but it will be tomorrow. It's 1-br, lovely with huge verandah and nice kitchen. All ye who are coming to visit, fear not; it is across the street from a nice cheap hotel and I am also getting a spare bed to stick in the living room. The kitchen and verandah more than make up for the non-having of a guest room. Besides, I'm going to move in February to a 2-br place. So come on down. (Up, if you're in Colombo.)
Oh, and my non-working cell phone is 077-311-5531. Country code is 94. Don't call until I say so. Then call. Often.
10.19.2004
Untreated sinus phlegm may result in obstructed Norse
Dire warnings for Scandinavians from the Kandy Herbal Ayurveda Centre. Take care, Norse! You too, Swedes! Actually I think the Norse are in town... I saw a busload of incredibly inappropriately dressed people going up the road to this one fancy resort area. I am embarrassed to be white when I see people in town behaving improperly... walking around smoking (not something you do on the street), wearing tight or scant clothing, putting on socks to wear inside temple grounds, eating babies, etc. Then I am reassured because they are definitely getting SO ripped off by every tout they see. They deserve it! As Jill put it, "it's not like Lonely Planet doesn't tell you to wear some damn sleeves!"
No really, I am so Lankan. I stare at sudda holding hands. I goggle at their spiffy camcorders and weirdly rugged sandals. Didn't they get the memo about flipflops?
On the poetic side: one of the things I had forgotten about is how Dangolla sounds in the morning. It's like a hearing a distant sports match--you hear thousands of birds cheering, crying, cawing, cock-a-doodle-doo-ing, and crak-crak-crak-ing; cows mooing and their bells klonking; buzzing whines of motors of all sizes (and all levels of disrepair) from many echoey hills; shouts of children on their ways to school; and then birds again. It's the everyday Super Bowl of Kandy. You hear it even as the mists from the previous night's rain have yet to burn off and the valleys and steeps are veiled in cloud. As the blue sky becomes more visible and midday heat bears down, the noise quiets--children in school, traffic slowed, birds eating or sleeping or whatever it is that they do during the day. Cows blocking the roads.
Anyway. Annexes: went back to see a favorite. It badly needs cleaning and has no phone or hot water (mercy!) but is still a frontrunner for location and space. However, when I say "badly needs cleaning" I am talking about worse than the Barn. As in, the spiderweb in the bathroom is a work worthy of preservation as an nth Wonder of the World; the kitchen has bizarre streaks of something on the walls; the curtains look like they're from the reign of the last Kandya king (ie early 19th century, for those who are keeping track). Aiyo. The phone is what bothers me, though... however the landlady promists that I can use her lawyer-daughter's computer for internet. I am skeptical. But, as we say here, what to do? I suppose in the long run hot water is really more desirable.
I did however have a nice time seeing an old friend who runs the best jewelry shop in town. He used to host for the ISLE program. He gives students great prices on beautiful stuff and is going to introduce me to the wedding-manager of the Queens Hotel (the poshest hotel in Kandy) and also try to garner me an invitation to the biggest society wedding of the year--which will be in December or January. The daughter of the Maliban biscuit/cracker company owners is marrying a foreigner. (This is like Chelsea Clinton or Paris Hilton or Suzy Q. Nabisco getting hitched in terms of social importance.) He is also going to introduce me to the island's most posh gown-designer. I think I am going to sign myself up to be a model so I can have an excuse to meet these people.
I am only partially kidding about modeling. I wonder if they would have me... I need a haircut.
I saw also a tiny, tiny, adorable puppy on the road today. It followed me and for about 25 yards I seriously thought about taking it "home" with me or picking it up another time and having a puppy in my life. It is very hard to see all the street animals that are suffering, especially the cute baby ones. The dirty annexe does have a dog with pups living upstairs! Bonus bonus. The dog however is named "Dinky" which explains why she's having a crisis of self; she wants to lick/bite/climb up any person she sees.
Dire warnings for Scandinavians from the Kandy Herbal Ayurveda Centre. Take care, Norse! You too, Swedes! Actually I think the Norse are in town... I saw a busload of incredibly inappropriately dressed people going up the road to this one fancy resort area. I am embarrassed to be white when I see people in town behaving improperly... walking around smoking (not something you do on the street), wearing tight or scant clothing, putting on socks to wear inside temple grounds, eating babies, etc. Then I am reassured because they are definitely getting SO ripped off by every tout they see. They deserve it! As Jill put it, "it's not like Lonely Planet doesn't tell you to wear some damn sleeves!"
No really, I am so Lankan. I stare at sudda holding hands. I goggle at their spiffy camcorders and weirdly rugged sandals. Didn't they get the memo about flipflops?
On the poetic side: one of the things I had forgotten about is how Dangolla sounds in the morning. It's like a hearing a distant sports match--you hear thousands of birds cheering, crying, cawing, cock-a-doodle-doo-ing, and crak-crak-crak-ing; cows mooing and their bells klonking; buzzing whines of motors of all sizes (and all levels of disrepair) from many echoey hills; shouts of children on their ways to school; and then birds again. It's the everyday Super Bowl of Kandy. You hear it even as the mists from the previous night's rain have yet to burn off and the valleys and steeps are veiled in cloud. As the blue sky becomes more visible and midday heat bears down, the noise quiets--children in school, traffic slowed, birds eating or sleeping or whatever it is that they do during the day. Cows blocking the roads.
Anyway. Annexes: went back to see a favorite. It badly needs cleaning and has no phone or hot water (mercy!) but is still a frontrunner for location and space. However, when I say "badly needs cleaning" I am talking about worse than the Barn. As in, the spiderweb in the bathroom is a work worthy of preservation as an nth Wonder of the World; the kitchen has bizarre streaks of something on the walls; the curtains look like they're from the reign of the last Kandya king (ie early 19th century, for those who are keeping track). Aiyo. The phone is what bothers me, though... however the landlady promists that I can use her lawyer-daughter's computer for internet. I am skeptical. But, as we say here, what to do? I suppose in the long run hot water is really more desirable.
I did however have a nice time seeing an old friend who runs the best jewelry shop in town. He used to host for the ISLE program. He gives students great prices on beautiful stuff and is going to introduce me to the wedding-manager of the Queens Hotel (the poshest hotel in Kandy) and also try to garner me an invitation to the biggest society wedding of the year--which will be in December or January. The daughter of the Maliban biscuit/cracker company owners is marrying a foreigner. (This is like Chelsea Clinton or Paris Hilton or Suzy Q. Nabisco getting hitched in terms of social importance.) He is also going to introduce me to the island's most posh gown-designer. I think I am going to sign myself up to be a model so I can have an excuse to meet these people.
I am only partially kidding about modeling. I wonder if they would have me... I need a haircut.
I saw also a tiny, tiny, adorable puppy on the road today. It followed me and for about 25 yards I seriously thought about taking it "home" with me or picking it up another time and having a puppy in my life. It is very hard to see all the street animals that are suffering, especially the cute baby ones. The dirty annexe does have a dog with pups living upstairs! Bonus bonus. The dog however is named "Dinky" which explains why she's having a crisis of self; she wants to lick/bite/climb up any person she sees.
10.18.2004
Urgent!
cc: Sri Lankan Trishaw Drivers
bcc: Sidewalk Salesguys
from: Irate Whitey Girl
Look, folks, I just want to help you in your business methodology. I am certainly a consumer of many goods and services provided by you and your class of individuals. I enjoy shopping and riding in tuk-tuks very much! However, this business of solicitation has got to stop.
No, really: if I want something, I will ask for it.
It is not helpful when every trishaw driver in a whole line of you asks me, "taxi, ma'am?"! You see, if I said no to the first guy, chances are that I am not tired enough to want a ride once I have walked five yards further! I am not comparison shopping!
It is especially unhelpful (and in fact off-putting) when every single one of you says "hello! hello!" in an effort, I presume, to gain my attention. I will not be wakened from some bizarre reverie and suddenly realize I am in dire need of a ride. I am somewhat aware of my surroundings and cognizant of the distance I have left to walk. If that distance is dismaying, I will seek assistance, do not worry.
And you there on the sidewalk, with the fabric/toys/knives/safety pins/scrub brushes/bric-a-brac, I am in fact capable of seeing what you are holding. You don't have to yell what you have. You don't have to waggle it at me--do I look sorely in need of an orange plastic toy baby that winds up and swims?
All y'all--seriously, "I don't want it" means "go the hell away," not "please convince me because I am only saying no over the price".
Many thanks!
ps--if you are holding five or six different things, mostly of decent value, like two necklaces, a knife, a teapot, and a walkman, I know you stole them. Shame on you.
cc: Sri Lankan Trishaw Drivers
bcc: Sidewalk Salesguys
from: Irate Whitey Girl
Look, folks, I just want to help you in your business methodology. I am certainly a consumer of many goods and services provided by you and your class of individuals. I enjoy shopping and riding in tuk-tuks very much! However, this business of solicitation has got to stop.
No, really: if I want something, I will ask for it.
It is not helpful when every trishaw driver in a whole line of you asks me, "taxi, ma'am?"! You see, if I said no to the first guy, chances are that I am not tired enough to want a ride once I have walked five yards further! I am not comparison shopping!
It is especially unhelpful (and in fact off-putting) when every single one of you says "hello! hello!" in an effort, I presume, to gain my attention. I will not be wakened from some bizarre reverie and suddenly realize I am in dire need of a ride. I am somewhat aware of my surroundings and cognizant of the distance I have left to walk. If that distance is dismaying, I will seek assistance, do not worry.
And you there on the sidewalk, with the fabric/toys/knives/safety pins/scrub brushes/bric-a-brac, I am in fact capable of seeing what you are holding. You don't have to yell what you have. You don't have to waggle it at me--do I look sorely in need of an orange plastic toy baby that winds up and swims?
All y'all--seriously, "I don't want it" means "go the hell away," not "please convince me because I am only saying no over the price".
Many thanks!
ps--if you are holding five or six different things, mostly of decent value, like two necklaces, a knife, a teapot, and a walkman, I know you stole them. Shame on you.
10.16.2004
Mage Address Eka
please, write me a letter or something, y'all.
is there a y'all? (i count three regular readers. if there are more than that, let me know.)
Rebecca Ennen
c/o ICES, Kandy
554/6A Peradeniya Rd.
Kandy
Sri Lanka
saw five more annexes today. i am going to pull my hair out by the roots: one was hella far (over 15km!) and one was someone's house (and therefore huge and full of stuff), and one was dark, menacing, and unfurnished, one was small, far, and taken during April, and the Only Acceptable Nice One has no phone. (and no furniture, but the landlords promise to "put some things.") at this point i'm moving to the house of Judy-Yvonne-Mina, the Senior Fulbright Family down the street from my hotel, because it cost fucking Rs.7,000 to stay in the hotel for a week. they are being very nice and sharing their place with me.
tomorrow i will try to chill out a bit--maybe an afternoon of hedonism is wanted, with perhaps a massage or a swim or something. it makes me cry to think that that's the only way for me to relax. i did have a good time with Yvonne (2), my Tamil friend who teaches at a Montessori school here and is looking for an apartment. she is getting married in January and wants a place for herself and husband. but things are pissing me off. i have been patient long enough.
please, write me a letter or something, y'all.
is there a y'all? (i count three regular readers. if there are more than that, let me know.)
Rebecca Ennen
c/o ICES, Kandy
554/6A Peradeniya Rd.
Kandy
Sri Lanka
saw five more annexes today. i am going to pull my hair out by the roots: one was hella far (over 15km!) and one was someone's house (and therefore huge and full of stuff), and one was dark, menacing, and unfurnished, one was small, far, and taken during April, and the Only Acceptable Nice One has no phone. (and no furniture, but the landlords promise to "put some things.") at this point i'm moving to the house of Judy-Yvonne-Mina, the Senior Fulbright Family down the street from my hotel, because it cost fucking Rs.7,000 to stay in the hotel for a week. they are being very nice and sharing their place with me.
tomorrow i will try to chill out a bit--maybe an afternoon of hedonism is wanted, with perhaps a massage or a swim or something. it makes me cry to think that that's the only way for me to relax. i did have a good time with Yvonne (2), my Tamil friend who teaches at a Montessori school here and is looking for an apartment. she is getting married in January and wants a place for herself and husband. but things are pissing me off. i have been patient long enough.
10.15.2004
Miss Adventures
it's now Friday. last i posted, it was Tuesday. progress report: no phone, more mosquito bites, one wedding invitation, one wedding missed, six more annexes visited, no more annexes settled upon or moved into. plus, i got attacked by mean dogs and locked out of my hotel one night. plus, that one lovely annexe is actually taken from March onwards. curses!
i'm having this sense of 'how am i going to keep myself busy for nine months?' ...all this unstructured time is really, really daunting and i'm supposed to be doing fieldwork and all. it's hard to do fieldwork when you're shy and nobody likes you. (kidding, mostly.)
the mean-dogs story is pretty funny. i was walking down to Kandytown (as we call it) from Aniwatte/Asgiriya area, through random paddy-fields and villages on a shortcut explained to me by the landlady of the nice but far-off and unfindable (#17 should be between 15 and 19, right? wrong!) annexe there. incidentally, it was really strange how the views of the valley from the road were far nicer than the views from the house!
anyway, i'm walking through this very poor village area, and looking for a flight of stairs that will cut through to the main road, when some dogs start barking. dogs here are trained to bark at strangers so people will know if someone's come around--mostly they don't bite or attack. but i'm walking up a steep flight of stairs made of old tires filled with sand, no wider than that, and some dogs start coming out of the bushes at the sides, and out of peoples' yards, barking-barking-barking and coming at my ankles with TEETH OUT. usually you can just menace them with a stone or a bag but one of them i gave a good zetz (Yiddish, "smack") with the bag and yelled at them to GET AWAY. the owners came running out and called off the dogs and sort of laughed at me. i was really shaken up and had to hyperventilate a bit to get the old shakes out of my legs. when i got to town i had a nice drink at The Pub (the Only pub) in Kandy to calm down.
it was a non-alcoholic drink, [un?]fortunately, as i then ran into the lovely-annexe owner. she is, as my amma put it, "extremely business-minded," a description which has been echoed by every adult who knows her in Dangolla. she's pushy, at least. we took the bus to near Dangolla and a trishaw up the hill and the whole way she's bugging me about when i'going to move in, why am i looking at other places, etc etc. She did promise lower rent--Rs.12,000 instead of 14. i have three places to see tomorrow but my resistance is wearing down.
oh, and then i ran away from my hotel because it was full of SL Army guys drinking beer and arrack, and stayed at Jill's house too late and got locked out. that sucked. (had to walk past a bunch of dogs too!)
random observation: everyone in Sri Lanka except my tailor friend Nalini hates my haircut--even my former ISLE professors. i keep hearing: why did you cut it? you had beautiful hair! o, what i wouldn't give for a few days in a culture with a little more value placed on privacy.
i should stop whining and find a house, no? i am generally okay but suffering, i think, from too long at sea (as it were). you out there--i miss you. a lot.
it's now Friday. last i posted, it was Tuesday. progress report: no phone, more mosquito bites, one wedding invitation, one wedding missed, six more annexes visited, no more annexes settled upon or moved into. plus, i got attacked by mean dogs and locked out of my hotel one night. plus, that one lovely annexe is actually taken from March onwards. curses!
i'm having this sense of 'how am i going to keep myself busy for nine months?' ...all this unstructured time is really, really daunting and i'm supposed to be doing fieldwork and all. it's hard to do fieldwork when you're shy and nobody likes you. (kidding, mostly.)
the mean-dogs story is pretty funny. i was walking down to Kandytown (as we call it) from Aniwatte/Asgiriya area, through random paddy-fields and villages on a shortcut explained to me by the landlady of the nice but far-off and unfindable (#17 should be between 15 and 19, right? wrong!) annexe there. incidentally, it was really strange how the views of the valley from the road were far nicer than the views from the house!
anyway, i'm walking through this very poor village area, and looking for a flight of stairs that will cut through to the main road, when some dogs start barking. dogs here are trained to bark at strangers so people will know if someone's come around--mostly they don't bite or attack. but i'm walking up a steep flight of stairs made of old tires filled with sand, no wider than that, and some dogs start coming out of the bushes at the sides, and out of peoples' yards, barking-barking-barking and coming at my ankles with TEETH OUT. usually you can just menace them with a stone or a bag but one of them i gave a good zetz (Yiddish, "smack") with the bag and yelled at them to GET AWAY. the owners came running out and called off the dogs and sort of laughed at me. i was really shaken up and had to hyperventilate a bit to get the old shakes out of my legs. when i got to town i had a nice drink at The Pub (the Only pub) in Kandy to calm down.
it was a non-alcoholic drink, [un?]fortunately, as i then ran into the lovely-annexe owner. she is, as my amma put it, "extremely business-minded," a description which has been echoed by every adult who knows her in Dangolla. she's pushy, at least. we took the bus to near Dangolla and a trishaw up the hill and the whole way she's bugging me about when i'going to move in, why am i looking at other places, etc etc. She did promise lower rent--Rs.12,000 instead of 14. i have three places to see tomorrow but my resistance is wearing down.
oh, and then i ran away from my hotel because it was full of SL Army guys drinking beer and arrack, and stayed at Jill's house too late and got locked out. that sucked. (had to walk past a bunch of dogs too!)
random observation: everyone in Sri Lanka except my tailor friend Nalini hates my haircut--even my former ISLE professors. i keep hearing: why did you cut it? you had beautiful hair! o, what i wouldn't give for a few days in a culture with a little more value placed on privacy.
i should stop whining and find a house, no? i am generally okay but suffering, i think, from too long at sea (as it were). you out there--i miss you. a lot.
10.12.2004
Why I Came to Sri Lanka
or, kottu rotti at the Muslim Hotel
quickly, then: kottu rotti is the best Sri Lankan food there is. it consists of a rotti (flatbread, naan-like) sliced into thin strips and fried with veggies and egg/fish/chicken/whatever. it is peppery and sometimes quite spicy and so, so good.
I had some from my favorite source yesterday: the Muslim Hotel (which means restaurant here) in Kandy, reputed to be "dirty" but actually quite clean if you ignore the floor and the "windows." it's fantastic there--full of scallions and ginger and unnameable spices.
there was also an adorable tiny kitten there, scrounging on the floor. I wanted to pack it up to take home.
then again, I still don't have a home... saw another annexe by chance last night as I ran into the landlady on the road. she previously rented to 2 'brighters, one of whom is Karly, my precedent in everything (she had my family, for one thing). the annexe is beautiful and has a huge verandah with a lovely view, but it's one bedroom only and is right in Dangolla, the town where I lived before and where all the ISLE students are. decisions, decisions.
today I'm at ICES, my host-research-center. they are admirably if overly laid back there; the head (brilliant) librarian is away and won't be back until the 22nd and she usually helps 'brighters get their annexes. ah well...
or, kottu rotti at the Muslim Hotel
quickly, then: kottu rotti is the best Sri Lankan food there is. it consists of a rotti (flatbread, naan-like) sliced into thin strips and fried with veggies and egg/fish/chicken/whatever. it is peppery and sometimes quite spicy and so, so good.
I had some from my favorite source yesterday: the Muslim Hotel (which means restaurant here) in Kandy, reputed to be "dirty" but actually quite clean if you ignore the floor and the "windows." it's fantastic there--full of scallions and ginger and unnameable spices.
there was also an adorable tiny kitten there, scrounging on the floor. I wanted to pack it up to take home.
then again, I still don't have a home... saw another annexe by chance last night as I ran into the landlady on the road. she previously rented to 2 'brighters, one of whom is Karly, my precedent in everything (she had my family, for one thing). the annexe is beautiful and has a huge verandah with a lovely view, but it's one bedroom only and is right in Dangolla, the town where I lived before and where all the ISLE students are. decisions, decisions.
today I'm at ICES, my host-research-center. they are admirably if overly laid back there; the head (brilliant) librarian is away and won't be back until the 22nd and she usually helps 'brighters get their annexes. ah well...
10.11.2004
Notes from a Bureaucracy
nothing is what it seems, you see?
it never before occurred to me that a "bureaucracy" could be a political system in the same way as, e.g., a "democracy." but here it sort of is--to do anything, you need to know someone who knows someone. you can't get a simple solution to a simple problem and everything is indirect.
case in point: getting a cell phone. ("mobile" or "hand phone" here) there are several options on this.
you can go to any little shop/stall where they sell electronics and get a reconditioned (maybe) phone that uses a card system--you put a SIM chip in the back, and buy what is essentially a calling card to use with this phone. you of course can receive calls and send text messages, but you're going to pay outgoing and incoming, and you're going to buy a whole bunch of cards every month--every week if you talk a lot on IDD.
then there's the option of going to a reputable dealer/service point for one of the "package" providers (meaning, you have an account and a bill, the normal way) and buy a phone and a connection that way. but!, do not expect to simply purchase these services and leave the place so easily! if you are a foreigner, you must pay a Rs30,000 deposit on the account. that's about $300, or 3 months' rent, for comparison. supposedly you can get this deposit back at the time you end your service, but Embassy sources relate that they try to keep your deposit any way they can.
the solution: you must find a Lankan who will let you take an account in his name. he (or she, but probably he) will have to give an address and national ID, and show bills or records in his name. your bill will go to this person, so it had better be someone you will see a lot. Jill's plan is to have her "land-family" (what else to call them?) get a phone in their name for her, since her mail will go to them anyway. I, having no land-family yet, am more or less screwed until I get one or cough up Rs30,000, a sum so princely that I am not yet comprehending it.
no matter! it's a beautiful steamy day in the neighborhood. you never feel the heat up in the hills, so you start out thinking that it's cool and breezy today, then descend into town and discover that no, it's hot-hot-hot as always. already today I've seen an annex which I will not be living in unless something drastic happens. it's across the street, literally, from the ISLE center; owned by one of amma's many friends and until recently occupied by her grown son and his family. as a result it was bizarrely furnished--no cooker (stove) or dishes or cupboards, but lots of baby toys and weird souvenirs and posters of cricket players. I told amma that I wanted a place closer to where I'm working. I hope she isn't offended. (most likely, not at all.)
another example of the indirectness of it all: when I asked what the rent was, amma asked me what my allowance (pay) is for rent. I countered that I had heard the going rate for annexes was Rs8000 a month. Amma's friend (the landlady) said that the electricity and water were expensive but Rs8000 was a good rent. I asked whether she wanted me to pay the bills or give her extra for utilities--how much? she warmly replied, no no, I'll take care of the bills, but you'll give some extra. how much? I said, asking both her and amma, thoroughly fed up with the whole bargain-for-rent escapade especially seeing that I wasn't going to take the place, and finally she said Rs10,000 would be good. then we talked about the deposit: three months in advance. and on, and on.
the real estate scene, such as it is, is odd too. it's not a "market" per se, because there is no competition, no price-comparison, no realtors mostly. when I say "the going rate for annexes," I really mean that--any size, any location. since there are WAY more annexes than people to occupy them, they all pretty much cost the same, unless you want a really spiffy place. for example, Jill's amma got her an annex for when she arrived. she moved in her first day in Kandy. she has a tiny annex, with a little kitchen, sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, meagerly but adequately furnished. price: Rs8000, plus utilities, the same as this 2-bedroom, huge-sitting-room place from today. you have to work hard, though, to find a decent landfamily and location. you can't just look in the paper or on craigslist; you have to know someone who knows someone in that area, etc etc.
so obviously, I'm in the throes. that seems to be the state of things with me. soon I'll be living a more settled life but until then it will continue to be throe-y. I was thinking today that yes, I should really get a small manageable place, but then I won't have room for the hordes that will be visiting! (that's you guys!)
oh, and mom--you can "comment" on my posts here by clicking on the hyperlink to "comment." if you want to email me you'll have to email me.
nothing is what it seems, you see?
it never before occurred to me that a "bureaucracy" could be a political system in the same way as, e.g., a "democracy." but here it sort of is--to do anything, you need to know someone who knows someone. you can't get a simple solution to a simple problem and everything is indirect.
case in point: getting a cell phone. ("mobile" or "hand phone" here) there are several options on this.
you can go to any little shop/stall where they sell electronics and get a reconditioned (maybe) phone that uses a card system--you put a SIM chip in the back, and buy what is essentially a calling card to use with this phone. you of course can receive calls and send text messages, but you're going to pay outgoing and incoming, and you're going to buy a whole bunch of cards every month--every week if you talk a lot on IDD.
then there's the option of going to a reputable dealer/service point for one of the "package" providers (meaning, you have an account and a bill, the normal way) and buy a phone and a connection that way. but!, do not expect to simply purchase these services and leave the place so easily! if you are a foreigner, you must pay a Rs30,000 deposit on the account. that's about $300, or 3 months' rent, for comparison. supposedly you can get this deposit back at the time you end your service, but Embassy sources relate that they try to keep your deposit any way they can.
the solution: you must find a Lankan who will let you take an account in his name. he (or she, but probably he) will have to give an address and national ID, and show bills or records in his name. your bill will go to this person, so it had better be someone you will see a lot. Jill's plan is to have her "land-family" (what else to call them?) get a phone in their name for her, since her mail will go to them anyway. I, having no land-family yet, am more or less screwed until I get one or cough up Rs30,000, a sum so princely that I am not yet comprehending it.
no matter! it's a beautiful steamy day in the neighborhood. you never feel the heat up in the hills, so you start out thinking that it's cool and breezy today, then descend into town and discover that no, it's hot-hot-hot as always. already today I've seen an annex which I will not be living in unless something drastic happens. it's across the street, literally, from the ISLE center; owned by one of amma's many friends and until recently occupied by her grown son and his family. as a result it was bizarrely furnished--no cooker (stove) or dishes or cupboards, but lots of baby toys and weird souvenirs and posters of cricket players. I told amma that I wanted a place closer to where I'm working. I hope she isn't offended. (most likely, not at all.)
another example of the indirectness of it all: when I asked what the rent was, amma asked me what my allowance (pay) is for rent. I countered that I had heard the going rate for annexes was Rs8000 a month. Amma's friend (the landlady) said that the electricity and water were expensive but Rs8000 was a good rent. I asked whether she wanted me to pay the bills or give her extra for utilities--how much? she warmly replied, no no, I'll take care of the bills, but you'll give some extra. how much? I said, asking both her and amma, thoroughly fed up with the whole bargain-for-rent escapade especially seeing that I wasn't going to take the place, and finally she said Rs10,000 would be good. then we talked about the deposit: three months in advance. and on, and on.
the real estate scene, such as it is, is odd too. it's not a "market" per se, because there is no competition, no price-comparison, no realtors mostly. when I say "the going rate for annexes," I really mean that--any size, any location. since there are WAY more annexes than people to occupy them, they all pretty much cost the same, unless you want a really spiffy place. for example, Jill's amma got her an annex for when she arrived. she moved in her first day in Kandy. she has a tiny annex, with a little kitchen, sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, meagerly but adequately furnished. price: Rs8000, plus utilities, the same as this 2-bedroom, huge-sitting-room place from today. you have to work hard, though, to find a decent landfamily and location. you can't just look in the paper or on craigslist; you have to know someone who knows someone in that area, etc etc.
so obviously, I'm in the throes. that seems to be the state of things with me. soon I'll be living a more settled life but until then it will continue to be throe-y. I was thinking today that yes, I should really get a small manageable place, but then I won't have room for the hordes that will be visiting! (that's you guys!)
oh, and mom--you can "comment" on my posts here by clicking on the hyperlink to "comment." if you want to email me you'll have to email me.
Notes from a Bureaucracy
nothing is what it seems, you see?
it never before occurred to me that a "bureaucracy" could be a political system in the same way as, e.g., a "democracy." but here it sort of is--to do anything, you need to know someone who knows someone. you can't get a simple solution to a simple problem and everything is indirect.
case in point: getting a cell phone. ("mobile" or "hand phone" here) there are several options on this.
you can go to any little shop/stall where they sell electronics and get a reconditioned (maybe) phone that uses a card system--you put a SIM chip in the back, and buy what is essentially a calling card to use with this phone. you of course can receive calls and send text messages, but you're going to pay outgoing and incoming, and you're going to buy a whole bunch of cards every month--every week if you talk a lot on IDD.
then there's the option of going to a reputable dealer/service point for one of the "package" providers (meaning, you have an account and a bill, the normal way) and buy a phone and a connection that way. but!, do not expect to simply purchase these services and leave the place so easily! if you are a foreigner, you must pay a Rs30,000 deposit on the account. that's about $300, or 3 months' rent, for comparison. supposedly you can get this deposit back at the time you end your service, but Embassy sources relate that they try to keep your deposit any way they can.
the solution: you must find a Lankan who will let you take an account in his name. he (or she, but probably he) will have to give an address and national ID, and show bills or records in his name. your bill will go to this person, so it had better be someone you will see a lot. Jill's plan is to have her "land-family" (what else to call them?) get a phone in their name for her, since her mail will go to them anyway. I, having no land-family yet, am more or less screwed until I get one or cough up Rs30,000, a sum so princely that I am not yet comprehending it.
no matter! it's a beautiful steamy day in the neighborhood. you never feel the heat up in the hills, so you start out thinking that it's cool and breezy today, then descend into town and discover that no, it's hot-hot-hot as always. already today I've seen an annex which I will not be living in unless something drastic happens. it's across the street, literally, from the ISLE center; owned by one of amma's many friends and until recently occupied by her grown son and his family. as a result it was bizarrely furnished--no cooker (stove) or dishes or cupboards, but lots of baby toys and weird souvenirs and posters of cricket players. I told amma that I wanted a place closer to where I'm working. I hope she isn't offended. (most likely, not at all.)
another example of the indirectness of it all: when I asked what the rent was, amma asked me what my allowance (pay) is for rent. I countered that I had heard the going rate for annexes was Rs8000 a month. Amma's friend (the landlady) said that the electricity and water were expensive but Rs8000 was a good rent. I asked whether she wanted me to pay the bills or give her extra for utilities--how much? she warmly replied, no no, I'll take care of the bills, but you'll give some extra. how much? I said, asking both her and amma, thoroughly fed up with the whole bargain-for-rent escapade especially seeing that I wasn't going to take the place, and finally she said Rs10,000 would be good. then we talked about the deposit: three months in advance. and on, and on.
the real estate scene, such as it is, is odd too. it's not a "market" per se, because there is no competition, no price-comparison, no realtors mostly. when I say "the going rate for annexes," I really mean that--any size, any location. since there are WAY more annexes than people to occupy them, they all pretty much cost the same, unless you want a really spiffy place. for example, Jill's amma got her an annex for when she arrived. she moved in her first day in Kandy. she has a tiny annex, with a little kitchen, sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, meagerly but adequately furnished. price: Rs8000, plus utilities, the same as this 2-bedroom, huge-sitting-room place from today. you have to work hard, though, to find a decent landfamily and location. you can't just look in the paper or on craigslist; you have to know someone who knows someone in that area, etc etc.
so obviously, I'm in the throes. that seems to be the state of things with me. soon I'll be living a more settled life but until then it will continue to be throe-y. I was thinking today that yes, I should really get a small manageable place, but then I won't have room for the hordes that will be visiting! (that's you guys!)
oh, and mom--you can "comment" on my posts here by clicking on the hyperlink to "comment." if you want to email me you'll have to email me.
nothing is what it seems, you see?
it never before occurred to me that a "bureaucracy" could be a political system in the same way as, e.g., a "democracy." but here it sort of is--to do anything, you need to know someone who knows someone. you can't get a simple solution to a simple problem and everything is indirect.
case in point: getting a cell phone. ("mobile" or "hand phone" here) there are several options on this.
you can go to any little shop/stall where they sell electronics and get a reconditioned (maybe) phone that uses a card system--you put a SIM chip in the back, and buy what is essentially a calling card to use with this phone. you of course can receive calls and send text messages, but you're going to pay outgoing and incoming, and you're going to buy a whole bunch of cards every month--every week if you talk a lot on IDD.
then there's the option of going to a reputable dealer/service point for one of the "package" providers (meaning, you have an account and a bill, the normal way) and buy a phone and a connection that way. but!, do not expect to simply purchase these services and leave the place so easily! if you are a foreigner, you must pay a Rs30,000 deposit on the account. that's about $300, or 3 months' rent, for comparison. supposedly you can get this deposit back at the time you end your service, but Embassy sources relate that they try to keep your deposit any way they can.
the solution: you must find a Lankan who will let you take an account in his name. he (or she, but probably he) will have to give an address and national ID, and show bills or records in his name. your bill will go to this person, so it had better be someone you will see a lot. Jill's plan is to have her "land-family" (what else to call them?) get a phone in their name for her, since her mail will go to them anyway. I, having no land-family yet, am more or less screwed until I get one or cough up Rs30,000, a sum so princely that I am not yet comprehending it.
no matter! it's a beautiful steamy day in the neighborhood. you never feel the heat up in the hills, so you start out thinking that it's cool and breezy today, then descend into town and discover that no, it's hot-hot-hot as always. already today I've seen an annex which I will not be living in unless something drastic happens. it's across the street, literally, from the ISLE center; owned by one of amma's many friends and until recently occupied by her grown son and his family. as a result it was bizarrely furnished--no cooker (stove) or dishes or cupboards, but lots of baby toys and weird souvenirs and posters of cricket players. I told amma that I wanted a place closer to where I'm working. I hope she isn't offended. (most likely, not at all.)
another example of the indirectness of it all: when I asked what the rent was, amma asked me what my allowance (pay) is for rent. I countered that I had heard the going rate for annexes was Rs8000 a month. Amma's friend (the landlady) said that the electricity and water were expensive but Rs8000 was a good rent. I asked whether she wanted me to pay the bills or give her extra for utilities--how much? she warmly replied, no no, I'll take care of the bills, but you'll give some extra. how much? I said, asking both her and amma, thoroughly fed up with the whole bargain-for-rent escapade especially seeing that I wasn't going to take the place, and finally she said Rs10,000 would be good. then we talked about the deposit: three months in advance. and on, and on.
the real estate scene, such as it is, is odd too. it's not a "market" per se, because there is no competition, no price-comparison, no realtors mostly. when I say "the going rate for annexes," I really mean that--any size, any location. since there are WAY more annexes than people to occupy them, they all pretty much cost the same, unless you want a really spiffy place. for example, Jill's amma got her an annex for when she arrived. she moved in her first day in Kandy. she has a tiny annex, with a little kitchen, sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, meagerly but adequately furnished. price: Rs8000, plus utilities, the same as this 2-bedroom, huge-sitting-room place from today. you have to work hard, though, to find a decent landfamily and location. you can't just look in the paper or on craigslist; you have to know someone who knows someone in that area, etc etc.
so obviously, I'm in the throes. that seems to be the state of things with me. soon I'll be living a more settled life but until then it will continue to be throe-y. I was thinking today that yes, I should really get a small manageable place, but then I won't have room for the hordes that will be visiting! (that's you guys!)
oh, and mom--you can "comment" on my posts here by clicking on the hyperlink to "comment." if you want to email me you'll have to email me.
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