Practice resurrection.

Oh, I like Choco Rios at the Weary Traveler on a snowy Monday night. It was hot Mexican cocoa + alcoholic banana something + cinnamon, cinnamon, cinnamon. So good. Bernd tasted like grog the rest of the night. Just kissing him with grog on his breath burned MY throat—that’s how strong that drink was! Mine just deepened my feeling of settled, sweetly sleepy contentment.

My stuff moves home today and I move home tomorrow. I walk around campus and feel strange and severed. I was such a good student, and now I need to learn how to be a good somebody else. I don’t know where I go directly from here, but I keep thinking of a Wendell Berry poem:

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Gibetsky.

1) Courtney and I spent four or five hours at the Rathskeller debating American foreign policy, our national security interests and—most depressingly—the sorry state of the public sphere in the United States. We were under the influence of much too much sugar, caffeine and nicotine, and it was great. But now it’s five hours later and I still need to write this paper.

2) My dismaying rant basically went like this... extended over several hours and backed with (much, much) more evidence and more vitriol:

American global strategy changes
When civilian leadership changes
And civilian leadership changes
When the voting public feels SOME WAY about SOMETHING
AND THAT MATTERS!
It matters if Iraq barely registers when a man casts his only vote out of an overblown aversion to gay marriage
And it matters if his neighbor votes with an eye to rehabilitating our image abroad.
IT MATTERS. A LOT.
IT MATTERS WHAT WE ELECT PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT—whether that’s restricting abortion or remaking Afghanistan!
It matters to troops when their home communities act and think like they’re not at war and it matters to policymakers whether or not the American people demand accountability or write a blank check for endless wars.
And it matters how we discuss foreign policy as a people—how often and how honestly!

IF we are not dying and killing and being bombed out of our homes, IF the electricity cooperates and the water runs clear and cool and drinkable, IF we know we will not pay the billions sunk in faraway wars, IF our interests stop at the end of our driveways or the limits of our school districts as long as our children are K-12, IF our compassion is critically limited by incuriosity, indifference and inattention, IF we have never met an Iraqi or wondered about him, we have denied him a share in our common humanity by not striving to understand and relate, IF we can’t locate Afghanistan on a map, IF the procession of distractions is endless, IF Nicole Richie has a new haircut—why should we care who kills and dies in our names on the other side of the world?

Sometimes I really hate us, honestly.



3) Honestly, sometimes I still date checks “2007.” This may have happened to me today.

4) Did you know if you type “honestly” with your fingers just slightly misplaced on the keyboard, you get “gibestky”? I like it.

Evil.

How should the United States military think about counterinsurgency operations as it moves forward in Afghanistan and the wider GWOT [Global War on Terror]?

Professor Suri! I can’t wrap my head around the immensity of this subject! I want to devote weeks and months and years to digging into it. The answers (if there are any) are always shifting, always evolving. My bedroom is littered with scraps of paper where I’ve recorded miscellaneous thoughts. I have twenty-six journal articles open in Adobe Acrobat, which makes my poor overloaded laptop decidedly unhappy. I have forty books scattered around me, some in my bed and—let me tell you—it was not comfortable trying to sleep on that many books. One or two - no big deal. I rolled over on three or four books as I tried to sleep last night.

I could talk about this subject for hours. But I can’t write about it. Just the act of writing something down assumes a degree of certainty, and the more I read, the more I discuss this, the more I know I don’t know and the more I’m tempted to keep reading and learning more forever. My big problem with academic essays (especially this one) is that I never know when to stop researching, pull my nose out of my books, press ‘pause’ on great discussions, and say, “Okay, I don’t/can’t know everything, but I know enough to write this paper!”


I am all about learning and digging. I'm all about that part of the process. I'm not sure I can produce any kind of polished, finished document on this subject that I won't want to tear to pieces immediately for its ignorance and shallowness and necessary incompleteness!

Killing a woman is like killing a bird.

What did I take away from Obama's speech? We can't 'win' the way the previous administration dreamed we would (indeed, we're not even going to delude ourselves into believing that's possible), and we can't leave. The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is precarious, to put it mildly, and we do care what happens there. But we need to be realistic about what we can achieve in Afghanistan. The new outlook for Afghanistan that Obama outlined last night no longer entertains any pretensions of being a righteous mission. It's realistic--depressingly so. Heartbreakingly so.

We're not there on a charity mission but are there to advance what we think are our interests. That's why some of the most oppressive governments in the Middle East will continue to be our most stalwart allies. GLENN GREENWALD.

The sad fact is that in Afghanistan, killing a woman is like killing a bird. The United States has tried to justify its occupation with rhetoric about "liberating" Afghan women, but we remain caged in our country, without access to justice and still ruled by women-hating criminals. Fundamentalists still preach that "a woman should be in her house or in the grave." In most places it is still not safe for a woman to appear in public uncovered, or to walk on the street without a male relative. Girls are still sold into marriage. Rape goes unpunished every day. MALALAI JOYA.

But Obama is more realistic about our limitations or at least more honest about his intentions than the previous administration when he acknowledges that we can't afford to define our national security interests so broadly that these interests include installing free and democratic governments by force. That isn't working for us. We're no good at it. Humanitarian interventions in moments of crisis are one thing, but we can't force countries to act and think along certain lines. We can't afford to engage in nation-building in Afghanistan: we can't afford this in terms of money, people, time, patience, energy, will, imagination or even attention. Maybe when the fighting dies down, maybe when the population is secure, maybe when the troops start pulling out, maybe when (if) we're not stretched so thin--maybe then other avenues to ensuring human rights in Afghanistan will open themselves to us. We can only hope.

We can only hope the surge works and that the US and our partners (however much we wish we had better partners in Afghanistan) become the big brand-name in security, food, water, education and Not Getting Blown To Bits in the eyes of the Afghan people, or else there's really very little optimism to be had.

It doesn't feel like the first of December (sun and blue skies, 50F), so it simply can't be. It must be November first. I'd even believe you if you said, "It's the first of October, but don't forget to bring a sweater!" My memory has collapsed the last three months into an untidy heap. I have no idea where the time went, only that I spent that time happy and happily worn out from late-night walks in the city and every kind of amusement (good people, good coffee, good music, good dancing, good travels, good risks, all worth it). My last semester of university has been wilder and sweeter than I could have imagined. There are a few too many (read: many too many) things competing for my attention right now--all of them pressing--and when I think about it, I realize I'm neglecting virtually every area of my life in some way. After graduation, I need to make some reparations: to my family, who I have visited too infrequently; to my old friends, who I miss too much; to my body, which craves a good long sleep and has tolerated too many meals on the run and not enough lovingly prepared and leisurely paced dinners... and that's just to name three!




A short list of jobs I am not qualified for, as posted on the UW Student Job Center:
- Shotput and discus coach
- Russian-speaking customer service representative
- Canine groomer
- Piano instructor
- Cross-country ski instructor (it looks like fun, but my attempts at skiing have been marked by a wicked magnetic attraction to tree trunks)

Cut him out in little stars.

Just because.

A must-listen: Oh, NPR and subversive Sesame Street!

Ernie: I'm never going to eat cookies in my bed again. I'm going to eat cookies in YOUR bed, Bert!

And this, too, something I still need to learn a good 17 years after I watched Sesame Street regularly:

Big Bird, it has to be this way because.
Just because?
Just because.

Because I still hopelessly rebel against "just because."



What do you still need to learn from Sesame Street?

Something to think about.

Miss you.

Week Two of midterms...

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Yesterday, Adam and I went to see Andrew Bacevich and today Lindsey and I are seeing Wendell Berry at the Overture Center! I love book week in Madison. Even if it were book week every week, it wouldn't ever lose its charm.


Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.



We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.

These causes seem insufficent.

I couldn't fall asleep to save my life last night, so I finished War and Peace for my advanced history seminar. And... I didn't outright love it or hate it. It contains a few profound insights and MANY beautifully crafted sentences, but these worthwhile passages are spaced so widely with so many windy paragraphs about overly sentimental romance and society gossip in between that I just couldn't really dig into the book at all. I think that someone should write a condensed War and Peace—all the philosophical and gritty war bits and nothing else…


But I did want to keep:

It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England's intrigues... It naturally seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war was Napoleon's ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the war was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving them employment... but to us... who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient... We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

You will die — and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything — or cease asking.

You probably want to be David.

“I feel like Goliath because I think theirs is a Goliath out there in independents and conservatives, and I think they’ve awakened the sleeping Goliath.”

Wait a minute, Christian values voter… you remember how the story about Goliath ends, right?

Dispatches from the Big Person Who Carries Everything.

We fell in a pond. For real. We’ve ‘fallen’ into ponds up to our kneecaps before, but this time we topple-crash-plunged into one. I was balancing on the bank and Aaron had his arms coiled around my leg so that he could lean out over the water… and he leaned too far. Before I knew what had happened, I was lying on my back in water up to my chin, my arms somehow already hoisting Aaron (who had been totally submerged) out without any conscious instruction from my brain. No harm done, but we were unbelievably muddy. He was really mad at me at first, forgetting that it was his lunge that landed us in the water. I apologized and his anger wore off in minutes. By the time we walked back home, he was laughing and saying, “I didn’t g’spect that to happen!” Our quest for dry clothes was thwarted by the discovery that the garage door opener, which had been in my pocket, no longer worked—we were locked out. We called my brother from the neighbor’s house and he brought me dry clothes and somehow managed to fix the garage door opener (I had tried airing out the battery and replacing it, but that garage door opener required a man’s attention, apparently, since he did the same thing I had done and it worked). We hosed off most of the mud and then Aaron took a long bubble bath and we played sharks and pirates. After awhile, the blue plastic shark (voice by Sarah, a monotone modeled after Martin the Martian) decided he wanted to gobble up Aaron’s feet instead of Duplo pirates. This was very funny. “Pirates! Yuck. Pirates taste like Tupperware. Urgh. But you! You taste like all the yummy things you ate today… like Mac n’ Cheese. And Cocoa Puffs. And strawberry popsicles.”

Did you know a blue whale is longer than a tennis court?




At some point, I stopped being The Little Person Who Does Everything and became The Big Person Who Carries Everything instead. Aaron and I ran around in the sun all day and my big purse dragged with Juicy Juice boxes, garage door openers, fresh size 3T Iron Man underpants, Ritz crackers and Cheerios in small baggies, Aveeno Baby sunscreen, library books, AND irregular leaves, seed pods, Queen Anne’s Lace heads, stand-out rocks, rusty nails picked up on the playground by Aaron The Living/Breathing Metal Detector. I came home to find a willow twig stuffed in the back pocket of my jean shorts, and I sure didn’t plant that there. I don’t mind, exactly, but it makes me feel old every time Aaron presses something into my hands and says “You carry it!” before he runs off to do something more fun that requires two hands and a light, free body.

Love should be allowed.

Took a brief break from all my history and foreign policy books to read a collection of short stories by Truman Capote, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s. His writing is everything writing should be—baldly honest, utterly unpretentious, sparkling with quiet humor.

“I think you could get in a lot of trouble,” I said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.

Morning was in the room.

I love that.

And this—

He’d been put together with care, his brown head and bullfighter’s figure had an exactness, a perfection, like an apple, an orange, something nature has made just right.

And this—

“No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Because I DO love Jose—I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds.”

And—

She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate’s cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds.

And—

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks… There was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so… She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plump hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically.

Africa without any Africans.

Reading about Hillary Clinton in Africa seized my sensory memory.

The aides were experts at the camera spray. In eastern Congo, we needed to use two planes to land at a small airport and Mrs. Clinton’s plane circled in the air for 15 minutes so journalists could land first, set up their cameras and get the arrival shot of her, the first secretary of state to swoop into Congo’s conflict zone, despite the fact this very area has been a killing field since the mid-1990s.

In Liberia, though, she missed a great opportunity: Her motorcade drove right past a muddy soccer field where all the players were on crutches and had one leg. It was an amputee soccer game, a spirited match between war-injured men who refused to give up. Bill would have definitely jumped out and charged across the field to commune. Had Mrs. Clinton, that might have been the enduring image of her Africa trip, not the irritated response in Congo.

But the convoy moved on, through the lashing Liberian rain. It’s strange to be in Africa in a bubble. I live in Kenya. I know how it can take two hours to get from the American embassy in Nairobi to the airport. But when the Kenyan government shuts down the main highway for Mrs. Clinton’s motorcade, voila!, it takes only 16 minutes. That day, as we raced to the airport in our air-conditioned vans, we passed thousands of Kenyans lining the road. These people weren’t waiting to wave goodbye. They were stuck in traffic. We looked at them and they looked at us, separated by glass and speed and unable to share even a word. In a way, it was like being in Africa without any Africans. Even most of the big-time hotels we stayed at had windows that didn’t open, denying us that distinctive African pleasure that might have jolted us back to reality: catching a whiff of woodsmoke.

I’m so glad only one night out of three weeks in Africa was like this for us.

Aaron and I tore around all day in the heat. We went to the park, stalked bullfrogs, experimented with ants’ food preferences (honey, berries, Juicy Juice, fruit snacks), ate pudding popsicles (ohmygod, how have I never eaten one of these before today?), pressed oak leaves, ‘planted’ a row of dry-roasted sunflower seeds (I observed that Aaron shouldn’t be too hopeful for bold yellow sunflowers on his return from California next weekend…), and then we struck out for tae-kwon-do, Aaron in his immaculate white robes sitting in his little red wagon. Tae-kwon-do was priceless as far as entertainment goes. Aaron is the littlest of the lot, and the least coordinated. Every other kick and chop sent him tumbling to the (generously padded) floor, and he would grin and leap to his feet. When the other kids stood stoically with impeccable posture, Aaron bounced around on the balls of his feet and gazed inquiringly up at the ceiling tiles. He told me the little colored stripes on his white belt stand for “tegrity, severence, and self control!” Tegrity and severence really do go a long way in this life.

He also dug everything out of my purse (I reminded him never to go through a woman's purse until he had at LEAST run a few blocks away) and disassembled a tampon before I knew what he was up to. He was very curious about it, but I said it was a "girl thing, you know, like lipstick." "Boys like lipstick. Kissy, kissy." "Okay, just a girl thing like nylons, you know, 'funny legs.'" But of course, he likes 'funny legs,' too. Whenever I wear colorful tights, he can't keep from plucking at the fabric!

He totally didn’t want me to go home. He kept grabbing my hands and saying, “Sarah, you forgot something here the last time you were here, so we have to go look for it” (I hadn’t forgotten anything) and “Sarah, I have to show you this!” and “Sarah, I have to take a photograph of you, because I’m going to California and you’re not!” so I made a silly face and he snapped his photograph. I adore him. I wish he were mine. The rest of the world can be positively demented at times, but he is perfect, always, even when wetting his pants and spilling tall glasses of milk and begging non-stop for Bazooka bubble gum. At this easy age, he still plunks himself down in my lap and fashions himself blond mustaches out of locks of my long hair and shouts “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah! Banana-fana…rana…farah!” when I show up on his doorstep, and his arms are still too short for him to tickle back effectively.

Occasional flirtation with domesticity.

Then I would bring an ax, no books.

1) Chickadees are eating our house. Yes, for real.

2) Babysat Aaron yesterday afternoon and evening. It rained non-stop, so we made up our own board games. CandyLandUnoPickUpSticksLife, anybody? We also built a terrific matchbox car race track that eventually consumed most of the basement. Aaron chattered away happily most of the day, but once went quiet for several minutes and then said very (very, very, very) seriously, “Sarah… do you ever hang out with other boys?” I was impressed it even occurred to him to ask, since preschoolers aren’t famous for their ability to look beyond themselves!

3) Oh, and I mentioned this to my mom the other day and she couldn’t stop laughing: When I was younger—11, 12—I used to wear an underwire bra 24/7, even and especially while sleeping. I was totally flat, but I was hopeful. I remember thinking, “If my boobs ‘come in’ overnight and I’m not wearing the right bra, my breasts will be weird-shaped for life!” because I would see old women with sagging breasts and not think, “They’ve probably nursed a lot of children and cleaned a lot of plates,” but “They must not have had the right bras way back when they were little girls!”

Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable?

The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: ‘Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?’ no longer asks herself: ‘Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on the political prisons?’

MARJANE SATRAPI. THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS.

This is a happy place. Happy thoughts.

Visited Aaron last night. He proudly showed off his T-ball trophy. I congratulated him and then said, in a silly voice, “But what is T-ball? Is that the one with the net where you spike the big, white ball…?” “NOOOOO.” “Is it the one with the really heavy ball that you try to knock down pins with?” “NOOOOO.” “Oh! Is that the one where you hit the ball with a bat and run around?” “YES!” “After you hit the ball, where do you go?” I asked, expecting "around" or "home plate." Aaron exclaimed happily, “THE TROPHY STORE!”

But we are thinking not just of the children who are living beneath the bombs.

From "Peaceableness Toward Enemies, 1991."

This latest war has been justified on a number of grounds: that it was a war to liberate Kuwait; that it was a war to defend ‘the civilized world’ against a dangerous maniac; that it was a war to preserve peace; that it was a war to inaugurate a ‘new world order’; that it was a war to defend The American Way of Life; that it was a war to defend our supply of cheap oil. These justifications are not satisfactory, even when one supposes that they are sincerely believed.

...

This war was said to be ‘about peace.’ So have they all been said to be. This was another in our series of wars ‘to end war.’ But peace is not the result of war, any more than love is the result of hate or generosity the result of greed. As a war in defense of peace, this one in the Middle East has failed, as all its predecessors have done. Like all its predecessors, it was the result of the failure, on the part of all of its participants, to be peaceable.

...

A war against the world is helplessly a war against the people of the world. Against everybody. The innocent. The children. Increasingly, as modern militarism builds and brawls over the face of the planet, people of ordinary decency are thinking of the children. What about the children? we ask as our leaders casually acknowledge the inevitability of ‘some civilian casualties’—or ‘collateral casualties,’ as they put it. But we are thinking not just of the children who are living beneath the bombs. We are thinking, too, of our own children to whom someone must explain that some people—including some of ‘our’ people—look on the deaths of children as an acceptable cost of victory.

...

The essential point is the ancient one: that to be peaceable is, by definition, to be peaceable in time of conflict. Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion or jubilation that follows war. It is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.

...

Finally, if we want to be at peace, we will have to waste less, spend less, use less, want less, need less. The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.


WENDELL BERRY

No one ever asks about Sprinkles.

We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars or ropes of diamonds.

"Did you see all the diamonds those ladies wore?" sighed Jane. "They were simply dazzling. Wouldn't you just love to be rich?"

"We are rich," said Anne stanchly. "Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we're happy as queens, and we've all got imaginations. Look at that sea--all silver and shadow and visions of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars or ropes of diamonds. You wouldn't change into any of those women if you could. Would you want to be that white lace girl and wear a sour look all your life, as if you'd been born turning up your nose at the world..."

"I don't know, exactly," said Jane unconvinced. "I think diamonds would comfort a person a good deal."

"Well, I don't want to be any one but myself, even if I go uncomforted by diamonds all my life," declared Anne.

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES.

This is Jesse, formerly known as Jezebel, when we all thought he was a girl cat. In our defense, he’s very hairy all over and ESPECIALLY down there, so it was hard to tell.


Dozing.


Magical garden implements.








Monstaspida.

Tanzania.

Zazu!


Cooling off after safari.


Baboons in the road. I will forever regret being too dumbstruck/captivated by the male baboons getting it on to snap a picture of THAT.


Just one of the many road hazards in Arusha.


This was really as good as it got, as far as latrines go.


A little boy in the Nkoranga Orphanage.


Bubbles.


Boys lounging.


Hyena in Ngorongoro Crater.


Hippos, immense and portly beings that they are, can roll over in the water with no struggle at all.




Eagle-thing.




Chameleon farm. This Tanzanian family farm is raising about 10,000 chameleons to sell to American pet stores.


DIGI DIGIS!


Young male in Ngorongoro Crater.




More baboons, not giving each other head for once.