Now that two miles has become an easy feat for my small lungs and heavy thighs to carry out, that and being in a familiar place where I am no longer a guest and am allowed to do the dishes, I find myself settling. Settling in with old friends (my bike), finding odd jobs, and trying out all of my sister’s new clothes (like her black acid wash skinny jeans and I know, I know, acid wash really but I dig on them). I have been busying my time by watching episode after episode of MAD MEN. You know when you get obsessed with something and you know your obsessed because you keep relating to it in real life conversations...its a little embarrassing.
Yesterday after sleeping almost 12 hours I went to pick up my film that I was having developed. Looking through the photos I rested my eyes on one particular shot, it’s the one with all my girls from India center at the Idly place one morning. That place is so romanticized in my memories, the standing tables, messy haired-dirty toothed owner who would guess our order every time we came in and ask, “tea madam?” at the end of our meal. We would all nod our heads yes in the middle of discussing the nights before adventure, or a homework assignment. I never minded the flies and liked washing my hands after eating, being able to self-serve water, and the view of livestock as I ate. I miss India, more then I missed Costa Rica, and I am impatient with the readjustment period.
But in spite of missing it today is Tuesday June 7th, I just finished watching the Bansky film Exit Through the Gift Shop. I tried to see it in theaters last summer before leaving for India but had too much to do and so I never did. I thought this movie would be more about capturing Bansky and how he did his street art while remaining so anonymous. But it ended on a sour note with a bunch of famous street artists who felt like the initial documentary maker Thierry Guetta sold out as he became pretty famous only after his first art show. I could see how much he liked the attention and money he was getting for doing fairly easily produced art. Maybe his success in LA was because he was a sort of knock-off Bansky, more collectible and accessible then Bansky is but lacking in sincerity. I saw all the other street artist’s disappointment in him including Bansky for turning the way he did, but I also got a new perspective on street art.
The venture is a somewhat egocentric one, you spread your signature name or message repeatedly all over the city, a semi uncontrolled space where everyone has to see it. It’s a way of being recognized on your own. The reason why I value what Bansky does so much is that what he does is art, something that really takes skill and is beautiful. His message is political, it makes you think, and it is not mainstream. As an artist he chooses to remain completely anonymous, even after he became famous, giving more value to his message. At the end of the film Bansky is interviewed about Thierry’s success and leaves us with a sad sentiment saying, “maybe Thierry was a genius all along, maybe he got a bit lucky, maybe it means art is a bit of a joke”, or maybe it shows the true meaning of what some of the street artists message to the people are, to wake up and think for yourself.
Before watching this movie I saw something that I think is really cool and interesting. I get excited whenever I see or read or talk about anything quantum. The concept is so fascinating to me. Here it is, get excited instead of down about art, and humanities inability to form valuable opinions about things.
I am running out of people to hang out with, running out of things to do (besides pack and clean) and all I can do is make hot cocoa to calm my nerves. When I get hungry I make cocoa oatmeal (why didn’t I think of trying that before, its amazing!!). It’s better than portfolio week where all I ate was idly in the morning and kept a jar of peanut to spoon-feed myself encouragement. My portfolio is done and unlike last semester I feel more accomplished. All that I did for my independent study was built on my own initiative. I tried to collect water samples from the slum at 5am in the rain, climbed into a sewage filled storm drain to pick out trash and talk to the neighbors, I wrote a letter to the government about what I learned on my study. Not only that but finishing all my other assignments that had piled up throughout the semester (including a paper about procrastination, the irony!) and being peer mentor I learned a lot about myself. heres the link to my online portfolio: http://indiacenter2011.weebly.com/
I have been spending the last moments with all the other students who are leaving Bangalore to other places in India or those going home. Everyone is sad about leaving in their own way and don’t know how to properly say good bye. How easily they leave and are gone. All of them dealt with it in their own way, some stressed, twitchy, lucky for me, my roommate cleans. My roommate, Aileen, left first, after we all went to the idly place for breakfast she left with a stuffed backpack and waved three times before finally disappearing. I can feel India disappearing from me. Like in inception it feels like the dream is slowing falling away around me, I am watching it disappear, the spirituality, the noises India makes, and then lastly me.
It’s hard for me to remember what its like back home, the cleanliness and how straight and square all the houses are with square lawns in front. India is messy but there’s magic hidden in the piles of rubble, the stories from yogi’s that live in Himalaya who can teleport, the mystery of a Baba who couldn’t be assassinated, and how the Ganga runs pure in Rishikesh but is totally polluted in Varanasi. I will miss all the Tibetans, Maoists, Marxist’s, Rajas, Muslims, Babas, Uniks, Strays, Beggars, Brahmins, Monkeys, Villagers, Tribals, Indigenous, Shopkeepers, Auto drivers, fruit stands, chai garam, fresh coconut, temples, mosques, cows…
I turned 20 in this country...
I look at this website that posts pictures everyday that Nasa has taken of space. This was April 15th ‘s post, the big, beautiful spiral galaxy “Messier 101”. I thought this was relevant because “Messier” is a good title for how I gracefully entered into my 20’s. Although spent with friends, took care of by friends, but I managed to mess things up with some friends. I received an e-mail from my mom the day of my birthday with the lyrics from the Joni Mitchell song she used to sing my sister and I to sleep when we were younger. I had totally forgot about this song, always singing the chorus part couldn’t remember the others lyrics never finding out who the song was by. Us on the top bunk, voice breathing these words that I did not know later would so easily describe the point I felt when I was turning 20.
So the years spin by and now the child is twenty
Dreams have lost a lot of grandeur, coming true
But, there'll be new dreams There'll better dreams a plenty
Explanation: Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse's large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. This mosaic of M101 was assembled from Hubble Legacy Archive data. Additional ground-based data was included to further define the telltale reddish emission from atomic hydrogen gas in this gorgeous galaxy's star forming regions. The sharp image shows stunning features in the galaxy's face-on disk of stars and dust along with background galaxies, some visible right through M101 itself. Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away.
Maybe life is like my birthday galaxy, a mess, spiraling, sparkling, until I end up in the nothingness black void, the center where I will die and decinegrate, disappear into unrecognizable matter. How easily we’re here in this world and then gone.
The oldest walking culture alive will remain in my memories until I return, good-bye India.
My hopes were that I would be able to post 15 short video’s I took with my new, (and now newly cracked) ipod. But technology is not on my side in what everyone calls this third world country.
So here are some things I have been doing:
I went on a trip to Kerala, we visited Silent Valley National Park, saw the Kathakali Dance and chained up elephants and took a trek to the top of a mountain where new houses were being built for the Indigenous People there...
I was the featured poet at Urban Solace on international Women’s day and read this poem:
I’m Saree, Addressed to a dress
This is my apology letter to the Saree
I’m sorry that I can’t wear you
Like you deserve
I’m sorry that my body is not equipped
I don’t have the hips
I have no resilience for your shape
I am used to the Barbies body
All butt and boobs
While your covering up your chest and legs but exposing that intimate curve of the hip
I’ve got mid drift
I am that clumsy American girl who sometimes can’t button her flannels right and has ripped shorts that show scarred knees
I have got burgers for eyes and fries for thighs
Where dressing ourselves up in the West is as complex as a zipper and button
Or shortcutting becomes something with elastic
It’s not as fantastic
As the woman I saw today
Tailored to fit
Each piece dancing with its partner, perfect knit
Strong duty and pride hang in the badge that drapes the shoulder
Visual carriers of culture
Your royalty, your queen
But this is not how women are seen
When I do wear the dress of the Indian woman
I put it on my face too
I feel like I am in the costume of a prisoner to a tradition, culture, and for me lack of freedom
Why should I conform to a concept of what a woman should dress like
Its not that I dislike
I just don’t want to be enslaved by an image that’s been pillaged
I will wear sorry on my face because I disgrace India
There’s grace that can be found in each fold of the saree
But my ankles get tangled
You couldn’t even run away because the saree doesn’t stretch in that way
My cleavage might look sleazy but that dress just makes me feel so uneasy
I feel more comfortable in tight blue jeans
Then a lose saree
You’ve got biological genes
And I ‘ve got starry
Eyes
I can make leaps to transcend and cross borders
Trying everyday to make that cultural gap disappear
But I’m sorry
Lo siento in Spanish
En Deutsch es tut mir lied
māf kījiye̐ in Hindi,
Shamisi,
Kodi,
Because I can’t even compromise that much of myself
For your beautiful silks
The textile not influenced by corporate logos
Where’s the artistry in mass production
Handmade block prints is your seduction
I deduct there’s no solution only resolution of the self
You stand behind your husband while the community whispers behind their doors
And I choose
To stand-alone
Nakedly not negotiating any part of me
I don’t want to be that oppressed in my dress
Maybe its because I’m afraid it will make me more like you
We all have complexes about our complexion
I’m not trying to bleach my face
Or burn it in the sun
But embracing its place
Sitting on my shoulders looking out as I humbly apologize to the saree
I made a gluten free banana cake and took a picture on photobooth of it while in the process burning through the chord of our stove followed by a small electrical explosion and a nice reminder of it on my finger...
I took some other photos on photobooth
I am sitting in the mountains, head cleared, waiting while life passes me by. My sister is here, she is the feeling of arms of love and family around me. How come I still feel a little lonely and lost in this country, on this planet? It may be the impending end of this India journey and the switch to another realty, back to that bubble that is America. Or, is it the thoughts on my impending 20th birthday?
-Traveled to a farm that practiced permaculture, called Hasera farm
I went to Vipassana not knowing I was in the year 2067…in Nepal. I only lived 2 weeks in that year (most of which was spent sick) but it’s ok because I will get another chance as a 75-year-old woman after years of living and decaying in the same body, 2067 will come around with my second chance…
This is an excerpt from a diary entry that I wrote in the beginning of my trip:
I walked fast out of the bus saying goodbye to Dia from Finland who I met at the bus stop and ended up sharing seats with. She was surprised by how small my backpack was. I was worried that I would miss my train so I sped walked through the crowd of people. A driver came up to me and asked where I was going, he quickened his pace making sure I was behind him as we talked price. I was basically running after this man as he took me to his rickshaw. When we got to the rick I began to have doubts about my hasty choice of drivers, he had trouble getting the car started. Then when I asked how much it was to the train station he said 250rps! I knew this was too much. So when the car started and we were still arguing the price I almost got out. But stayed in because I could tell he realized how serious I was. We ended up spending the first half of the ride-arguing price: me, threatening to get out and get another rickshaw and him, driving while not looking at the road. The thing I could agree with in the situation was that wherever he was taking me, he was going there fast. He used a different tactic and switched to speaking to me half in English and half the local language so that I couldn’t understand his argument. He even resorted to singing his price to me. We got settled after a while and he introduced himself, Ganesh was his name, and he asked what my good name was and where I am from. He acted so hyper I was almost positive he was high on something but, as we talked more, and I didn’t see any glaze in his eyes I concluded that it was just him, his character. I was able to relax a bit after this and I asked him jokingly if the big hotel that we passed on the way was where he lived or if he owned it because it was called, “Hotel Ganesh”. He liked the idea and then started calling the city, “Phoebe city” (or however he pronounced my name). We talked more about things like how he smokes cigarettes but doesn’t drink and I made up a story that I had a husband but no kids yet. He drove like we were in a video game and when he asked me if he should slow down I said that I just didn’t want to die. When we reached the station I realized how early I was and how far we had gone. So I gave Ganesh 200 rupees because I liked him mostly but also I didn’t have exact change for the 150 I had worked so hard to bargain before. I didn’t feel like arguing more over the $1. I got out of the rickshaw waving to Ganesh and his 3 front toothed smile as a boy walking by tried to cop a feel and only smiled back at my frowning at him.
December 14th, 2010 Train to Delhi
There’s nothing like the train experience in India. You get visited by everyone; Uniks, (men dressed as women who everyone fears will put a curse on if they don’t give them money), missing limbed people who crawl along the aisles and ask for money and of course the creepers, men who think you will have sex with them in the train bathroom. Sitting in the open doorway, pee from the toilet next door (which is basically just a hole in the floor of the train) splashes my feet a little. Trashed tracks below and pure speed and wind make me feel freer then I have in a long time. No school, now one else I am traveling with and unknown land. I could get off this train whenever I wanted to. The only limits are the speed of the train and this body of mine.
After Vipassana…
It’s hard to talk and even write about. Probably because the whole time I wasn’t allowed to do those things during it. Now that I think about it, I cannot believe I went all that time without music (besides that one day I sang those two songs aloud while taking my bucket shower) reading, art, tv, processed sugar, CHOCOLATE, a cell phone, electrical machines (besides lights that only worked a couple hours a day). I spent those 10 days meditating, sleeping, and eating and that’s pretty much it. I had probably 4 hours out of the day that was not meditation. In the quiet times I went from fretting horribly about my future to digging, then trudging around in my past. Memories of things that had happened that I hadn’t thought about since the moment they happened. Like all those hours my dad would sit and do homework with me (especially the math). How impatient I was and how his seemed endless. I remembered a show my sister and I used to watch on ABC family about this group of boys who did dumb stuff with their skateboards in their backyard or how we used to share a bed when we were younger. I even thought about my old dog, Tilly, the way it felt when I pet her in my favorite spot on top of her head in the curve of her skull and on her snout right before her wet nose. I remember how she started farting more when she got really old.
CHRISTMAS
I woke up the morning after my friend and I had discovered the little presents Vipassana had given us in our heads but especially in our hair and wrote a note. The note said:
Merry Christmas!
This year I got lice and a little bit of enlightenment.
<3 Phoebe
I placed the note in my friends shoe outside her door before I left for 4am meditation. The whole day I assumed I would have trouble meditating because I would be thinking about missing Christmas at home, but I was happily surprised when I did not. I didn’t really think about it at all. The next day was the 10th day, the day we could break our silence and talk! In our morning meditation all I could do was think about what my friends and family were doing because it would have been their Christmas night. I have for the past, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 7 years gone to my friends house for a party. I started to cry sitting there in that room full of silent, closed-eyed people. I figured it had just taken a while to hit me. When we all walked out and met in a group that’s when the silence broke. Women started crying and hugging, all with smiles on their faces because it had ended. A girl who had seemed like a grumpy person said to my friend and I, “Merry Christmas”. I stopped and had to rethink. I realized later when I got my cell phone back that I had mixed up the date of Christmas and that’s why I wasn’t upset the day I thought that it had been.
Letter to a friend January 21st, 2011
I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. 10 days of no talking, writing, reading, music, TV, Internet, computer…just meditating… I think I described it to myself in the first couple of days as a prison camp inside my mind. Spending day after inside my mind I worked through a lot. I felt like I went from childhood to present in memories. I learned how much in life I am taught to look outside for things, when really I should be looking in. I already knew but couldn’t really put why I knew religion was not for me. Now I know, it is because I don’t feel comfortable looking to anything else for guidance. Coming out of meditation I felt like, “I am god”, that I had infinite compassion for everyone and such peace I have never known. Jealously and forgiveness were two big things I worked on and I’m still not done. But what did come up was you and I realized that I was still holding onto whatever irrelevant things happened in the past with us. So in hopes of moving on I am writing in “The Book” (lol) which I found while switching rooms with my roommate for the rest of my time here in India. So much has happened since I left last summer, I am sure we both have plenty to catch up on! When I get back to Portland I plan on chilling there for a little but longer then last time so I am looking forward to Powell’s, parks, and party excursions with you!
Wishing you infinite LOVE
Phoebe
Kathmandu
When I made the decision to take the “deluxe” bus from Delhi to Kathmandu I will admit it, I had expectations. And right there, that was my mistake. Getting to the bus that morning I was happy because everything went pretty smoothly- unlike anything about the actually ride I had on that bus. The morning of, I talked to my family on skype, ate a chocolate banana dosa (!), bought socks and pomegranates and got a ride from the travel agents uncles’ bike to the bus. All the seats from the front of the bus were packed so I happily went to the vacated back so I could spread out. I was hoping I could spend the next 32 hours to Kathmandu reading and writing. In the beginning I thought to myself, this will be great, I can see the countryside, read, and have some quiet time. I was so proud at how adaptable I had become while also pondering a question I came out of my Vipassana with: Why do I out myself in uncomfortable situations (like 10 days of silence or 32 hours bus rides) and somehow find such pleasure and comfort in it? Goenkaji, the guy who we would listen to over the tv screen give nightly discourses called talked about misery a lot. So for those 32 hours on that bus I was probably not uncomfortable for about 2 of them. After only getting a couple hours sleep the first night on the bus, I started to get car sick, altitude sick, some kind of sick. With every bump my migraine pulsated and the nausea threatened the seat that I had been hitting my head on while trying to sleep the night before in front of me. It didn’t help that the group of men who talked to each other in some language I didn’t know but could tell when they discussed where they thought I was from were also smokers. The real complications started when my phone battery was left to one bar. Then I realized that my Indian cell phone, which I was told would work in Nepal, was actually not working. So I wouldn’t be able to locate Aileen and worse I had only one contact number of someone who I had never met or talked to, in a country I had never been in or taken time to read about. When I reached Nepal after driving over mountains, passing turned over buses, it was later then they said it would arrive in Kathmandu.
Nepali Mountains [photo taken on a hike to a Buddhist temple from Hasera Farm]
I asked to barrow someone’s phone to call the contact I had and talked to him briefly saying he would pick me up at the bus stop and that I should call him when I get there. My fever was at its peak and I was sure I would throw up. I ended up falling asleep for a little bit and got woken up by the security guy’s flashlight at the checkpoint. We reached the first bus stop and I realized I didn’t know which stop to even get off at. So I tried to call the contact number again but the phone said something in Nepali and when I asked the stinky smokers they said that the phone was turned off. So bus stops went by and I decided to go ask the driver. My trusted driver and crew smelt horribly of liquor but he let me use his phone and didn’t seem like he was going to put me in any more trouble then the intoxicated driving he was already doing. We called the number probably 50 times and before the last stop one Indian guy who I had friendly talked to about Germany tried to convince me to go to a hotel with him that night. So I stayed on the bus ending up in their parking lot discussing what I should do with the bus driver. He said no hotels were opened in the area but that I could take an overpriced taxi to an overpriced hotel or sleep on his bus. The driver gave me blankets and left for his house, I had decided feverishly to sleep on the bus for the night.
NEW YEARS
Sick.
In bed.
Asleep before midnight.
Next day called my dad telling him that I wanted to quit Global College and come home.
Went to the emergency room, doctor told me I had one of the three things: a urine infection, food poisoning or an STD!!
My train to Varanasi leaves in a couple of hours at 9:30 in the evening…The last overnight train ended my long field trip with the group but opened new doors for next semester. A woman in a bright sari commented on my henna as I was passing her compartment. I was heading back to my seat after a friend and I had spied on a cute boy in a nice Kurta with chest hair. In our pursuit we ended up being followed by a drunken creep who ruined the whole endeavor for us. This woman though was not like any Indian woman I had ever encountered on my own, she was even more. She was the sister of a shopkeeper in Jaisalmer that me and the girls had gone to, her sister was so pushy though talking about how she was part of an organization to help local women by giving them equal share of the profit of their crafts. I was skeptical of her so we didn’t buy anything or stay very long.
The sister now told me all of what they were doing, that she had started the shop (the only shop in Jaisalmer run by women) and was helping the women that made their products to become more empowered financially and personally in their own lives. She said the community didn’t support her and her sister and would lie to tourists leading them away from her shop. When she first opened the shop she said they smeared cow dung on her sign. She spoke so openly about how she wished she had more freedom and independence saying, “I think American women should switch with Indian women and then maybe the men [Indian] would understand”, followed by a laugh that felt contagious. She talked about how she wanted to continue in school to get her PhD and become a teacher but that her husband wouldn’t let her because he thought that she wouldn’t have enough time for him. I glanced over at her husband a couple times during this whole conversation, I wondered how he would react if he spoke English. He was such a kind of small ordinary man compared to this woman’s huge personality and sparkling sari. I went back to her that night 2 more times getting up the courage to ask her if she knew anything about the practice of Sati (my personal academic interest I have been pursuing). Contrary to what anyone else has told me she said that Sati still does exist, mostly in the villages and told me a little about how the ritual is performed on a certain moon cycle. She said i could come with her to talk to the women and do research and this seemed like the perfect idea for my independent study next semester.
I have mixed feelings about going into a field research study with Sati or issues concerning women’s rights because I know my values are different. The cultural practice Sati to me, seems like a gross moral injustice to the world but who am I to say that to whoever is practicing it. I read in the book that there are accounts of some women who voluntarily commit Sati and jump in the funeral pyre with her husband because they believe they don’t have a life without him. It’s so complicated because a widow in India in some places is treated almost as an untouchable so the reality of a life after the husband dies can be worse for the woman. Then there are women like the one i met on the train who is so blatant about how her culture treats women and is not only fighting in her personal relationships to break this tradition but in her professional life and as what she calls it “charity work”. So where is this change coming from, are western values being pushed on Indian women? Is this want for change coming from westerners themselves? From globalization? Or is it natural, like how all cultures are hybrid and the change has just been fueled by the women who have the power to help fight for it?
Where does that leave me again…in my opinion all women and people in general deserve to be treated equal with equal opportunity and freedom in life…so if gender equality is coming genuinely from the women of India then I think I would support that but how I go about doing that I think I have to be very thoughtful of.
Update on loss of material possessions
-One of my water bottles (the robot one with the suck top)
-Waterproof travel notebook from Powell’s (contained diary from independent study in Costa Rica and other thoughts)
-Exposed a whole role of film that I had taken since I had been here (rolled it the wrong direction and the film came out of the canister)
Other things lost…
-Didn’t lose but ruined the duffle my sister lent me (bag was too heavy and made holes where is strap connects to the bag on either side)
-Faith in ever feeling not tired
-Brain cells
-Moisture in hair
Gained in material possessions
-Blue silk (western) dress
-Duffle bag given as a free gift from the salesman (to possibly replace my sisters)
-Hotel ashtray
-White kurta
-White, not all silk; dress (western but with a Tibetan style)
-Blue vest
-Bell anklets
-Scarves
Other things gained
-Bug bites!
-Books finished reading: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
*Excerpt from my diary on my opinion of the book besides it being raw poetry “reading Dharma Bums feeling like even this experience [mine] is more exotic and sincere then this fake Buddhist”. But I also wrote down a quote from the book that I really like, “Nobody can tell you that you aren’t free”.
And Death by Fire: Sati, dowry, and female infanticide in modern India by Mala Sen
-New amazing yoga routine
-Experience of riding a camel in the desert!
-Had an experience when we went out to the desert where I tripped on something called bhang (marijuana), which is legal in north India. At one point we went out on the dunes at night and I looked at the horizon and the whole sky was made up of this grid in a white twinkling outline of tiny infinite seeming squares.
-Offers for sex/uncomfortable implications (men ranging from street boys age estimated 14 although he said he was 17 to yoga teacher whose 55 married and hinted at me wanting it with him) offers for opium, hash, and marijuana
-Business cards for different hotels and restaurants (at least 10 just in Jaisalmer)
-Crazier craving for real Mexican food and Gluten-free pizza
-More “good luck”, as I walked by the Ganga and under a telephone pole I felt something drop on my head, a little boy started laughing at me. I looked up and felt my head…MORE BIRD POOP. I washed my hair in the river that’s probably infested with more feces then what I was rinsing out and thought about how I should try my luck at the lottery.
I felt initiated into India the day I went to the police commissioner’s office. I spent all day there from something like 10:30 to 2pm waiting for my number to be called, only to be crapped on…literally. The waiting area was outside with a sort of covering that looked like a nice place for pigeons to hang out in. So I was standing under this covering chatting with my friends, when I feel a warm drop of whitish-green liquid appear on my leg… bird crap. HA HA totally laughable right? Except this isn’t the first time this has happened to me.
Last year in Costa Rica it happened. One of the always-sunny Costa Rican mornings I go for a run around the futbol field in my neighborhood and all of a sudden from the sky falls the crap and it lands, this is the best part, on my face. My host family didn’t hesitate to laugh at me (they never would) when I returned home. In India I was told its good luck to be pooped on (no, you perv not like that!) but I feel like wherever I am in the world, whatever situation it might be it will always suck to be shit on for poopsake!
When I first got here I saw India but I didn’t actually believe what I saw. (kind of like looking at this picture from my favorite websites http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100920.html) I would be looking out a bus window or feel something as real as the wind inside the rickshaw but still didn’t really believe where I was until tonight I think. I was walking home from dinner with the girls, looking up at the palm trees trying to imagine what it would have looked like before cement streets and corner stores, it must have been a jungle I thought, totally wild. But the houses that are apartment type buildings on top of each other made up of old painted looking stone or cement almost swallow up the sky. Or maybe I just don’t care to go that far because the balconies of colored laundry, steaming dinners and curious kids are so distracting. There is too much I want to learn.
What would my blog post be without a list!
- Successful 25 days of being a vegetarian
- At 2 chai’s a day and sometimes more I have had around 57 cups of chai so far in India
- Quote from my roommate Roo about Indian men “its only a toilet if there’s foreign ladies around”
- Purchasing wine at a corner store ironically named “not just wine and cheese” that only carries alcohol
- Its not ‘karma’ but ‘karm’, its not ‘Yoga’ but ‘Yog’
- Sign for body whitening cream
- Dog licking a dirty baby diaper
- “Your breasts are like water balloons”
- got to drive a rickshaw
I miss my bike (the smooth clean pavement with fresh air, my thunder thighs propelling the wheels under and up liberal MLK street with all the freedom the distance of my existence allows me to make)
I don’t understand why summer days move at a different pace then normal days. They always have and while I still have more days of my summer left I am having trouble remembering how I got here.
I cannot put my whole summer into one blog post but I can put it in this perspective, if my summer were on a graph every two weeks would peak and then start heading downhill. It would look like the mountains in Montana, at Glacier National park that I visited with my sister. Huge ruff, ragged, up scales and declines some times kind of dramatic but also very natural. But what would my post be without a list!
Here is a list of things the summer took away from me…
Items Lost
Book lent to me by friend: Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan *found
Book lent to me by the Clackamas County Library: Why is sex fun, the Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond *bought new copy at Powells for $10 hopefully the library will except this copy when I have finished reading it sometime in the next 5 days
Bike biked it to the bus stop and got on the bus without it…something else was probably lost with it...like my sanity *found and rescued by my sister
Sunglasses the ones that appeared in Juno the movie must have left them on the bus
Running Shoes must have also left them on the bus, possibly the same day
Hat my sister had knit, this amazing hat was to replace my old one that shrunk to miniature happy me size in the wash. Must have lost it downtown walking to Backspace or in Backspace I don’t know…don’t have the heart to tell my sister, more like the balls she is going to be pissed, I’m pissed it was an awesome hat.
Leather Jacket (most recent loss…still mourning)
I think some of this had to do with my goal for the year, which was to become less attached to my material things…which is good, but my leather jacket…really world?
I thought I would also do a list of things I gained, as in pounds after what I have made and then quickly consumed this summer. I was so excited for Gluten Free baking and cooking with my own kitchen and oven that I decided to document everything that I made. As you look through these pictures just imagine them purified, drippingly plastered against my innards…mmm now your excited.
First was rice pudding, it looks better then it tasted...i cooked things mostly that i missed eating from Latin America and things that i missed eating from the States.
I don't remember the contents of this masterpiece but it included beets, mexican cheese and possibly an egg. SO GOOD
This is something I ate at Ceibo (sustainable community, see other posts) and wanted to try to make it myself. The only real big difference in making it was the fire taste i got from cooking on a fire stove in the mountains. It was still really good and i made it multiple times this summer actually. Garbonzo's, Carrots, Onions and best of all Rosemary!
Gluten Free cookies!
Made and shared with friends at the first house i house sat this summer. It was for my moms landlady's mother, an elderly woman who had broken her elbow. She was an animal lady with 5 different cats, a little dog (hardly able to call it that) squirrels, birds, raccoons and some stray cats as well. i felt like i had aged a century after i stayed at that house.
Oh yess
I did...but wait
It gets sooo much better
Joy the Baker's Chocolate layer Avacado Cake! (i made gluten freeeeee)
I miss good mango's! Adapted from a recipe i got from the yoga retreat in Nicaragua
with lentils!
My dad makes the best Fritataaaaaa
ok, this was a little weird...i never had a real thanksgiving pumpkin pie
and yes i know its the middle of July or August or something..and it was like 90 degrees outside but...
It tastes soooooo good (again GLUTEN FREE)
Gallo Pinto (kind of a pathetic attempt at replicating my host moms but it looks the same!)
*I also made a huge delicious Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Bread but never took a picture of it because i was in too much of a hurry to get to the beaaach!
I did a lot of things I wanted to do this summer. I sort of had a mental checklist of things I wanted to do. I did the Oregon coast, voodoo, music music music and I even made some new friends! I worked doing some house sitting and assisted at a camp at Waldorf for little kindergartners. My favorite quote from the camp was: "Maya, please get those ants out of your pants". No explanation needed, these are kindergartners!
I also worked on my writing, participating in a workshop put on by ibex studios (http://www.ibexstudios.com/) with Becca. There was a group of 7 or 8 of us who met for 4 Wednesdays in a row. I wrote one short short essay and two poems that I like. One is a poem about this moment I had late one night trying to find a bus home. I was in some sort of bliss about Portland and how grand it is. I crossed the Hawthorne Bridge listening to drum circle that happens sometimes under the bridge and played my harmonica while walking. Completely alone on this bridge I finally stopped and looked at downtown, it seemed huge and impressive, with the different colored lights. Mostly unexplainable what that moment was, some kind of awesome.
The other poem I wrote unintentionally, the intent was to write a body of a piece of non-fiction instead of a poem…fail. But oh well here’s another poem that I wrote while having a series of nights of intense dreaming to the point where I would be exhausted waking up. It was after I had seen the movie Inception in theaters; the last movie I had seen in theaters was last Christmas so the experience kind of overwhelmed me.
Like a dream you don’t really remember where a poem begins
You only remember when it ends
You remember the last thing you hear or read or understand
And at the end you’re supposed to come out with some big realization
Like this: the truth of a poem does not come in the beginning
What would you have to look forward to?
And if it’s proclaimed in the middle
You would miss the unnecessary, probably inevitable dull ending that would have to follow that rash statement
You can’t trust time
Or your brain
I don’t remember where the memory starts
I just remember thinking ‘that’s weird, I wonder why dad is talking to mom on the phone’
Usually the preferred communication between my always-divorced parents has been through my older sister or I
It was Christmas time because the toy carousal was out with the horses dancing
It played a song I never got tired of
I liked to sit and watch it turn
I should have been watching my mom on the phone but she had left the room while she was talking with my dad
She came over to the carousal
I don’t remember where my sister was my memory cut her out
My mom came close, phone still in hand and said “Grandpa passed away”
And then like a dream I wake up
Except its real but I can’t remember how I got there or how it ends
I write poetry as a therapeutic decompression
To recycle and understand everything that has happened to me
Or maybe it’s to wake myself from the life I have been dreaming
It’s hard to know what’s more of a reality
Is it the words that sit immovably permanent on the page?
Or the carefully, and in perfect punctuality of life,
It plays and progresses in a time-line
But some moments seem to go at different paces then others
Like the first time you know your in love
And even if a second goes by on a clock, the one you watch change while waiting for the bus to come, or something like the length of a breath or the calculable minute
You wouldn’t be able to tell
Because in this particular moment nothing as understandably measurable as time, Exists
But maybe you’ve just wasted your time listening to this poem
But in spite of missing it today is Tuesday June 7th, I just finished watching the Bansky film Exit Through the Gift Shop. I tried to see it in theaters last summer before leaving for India but had too much to do and so I never did. I thought this movie would be more about capturing Bansky and how he did his street art while remaining so anonymous. But it ended on a sour note with a bunch of famous street artists who felt like the initial documentary maker Thierry Guetta sold out as he became pretty famous only after his first art show. I could see how much he liked the attention and money he was getting for doing fairly easily produced art. Maybe his success in LA was because he was a sort of knock-off Bansky, more collectible and accessible then Bansky is but lacking in sincerity. I saw all the other street artist’s disappointment in him including Bansky for turning the way he did, but I also got a new perspective on street art.
