elegies V

the poem from my last elegies post made me think of another one, one of my favorites. it's from a genre of palestinian exile poetry. i've only found this one translation online, aside from where i originally read it a few years ago, in a book for class on the israel-palestine conflict.

"The Traveler"
-Yusuf Abdul al-Aziz
  
He visits the station,
buys a ticket, and goes away.
He dreams of the unblinking sun,
of inns by the sea,
and the woman like a lily.
He drinks her kiss
in bed
near quiet window.
Always he had gathered his days
as the sea gathers its waves at twilight.
He watched them closely, then departed
for inscrutable destinations.
-Did you find the right departure date?
-No, I found the road that has severed the river
from its source.

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and lov and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.

correlation o' the day

new from oktrends, 10 charts showing random significant correlations about sex, drawn from their user data base. the last one gives me an excuse to re-blog it!

it compares per capita GDP of a nation to the tendency of okcupid users in that nation to indicate that they are looking for casual sex. the fine folks there found that:

"...money seems to be a more powerful influence on sex drive than culture or even religion. You have, for example, Portugal, Oman, Slovenia, and Taiwan within a few pixels of each other on the right side of the graph, and Syria, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala almost stacked on the left, and all of them sit along the trend line."

you can click through the link above to toggle over the data points to see individual country data, but here's an image of the graph by region:

right. so i think this is an interesting jumping off point, if not a satisfying final conclusion. several things occur to me, and they mostly have to do with how we're defining our independent and dependent variables: prosperity an sexual proclivity.

Prosperity as independent variable measured by per capita GDP

1) Is per capita GDP here nominal or PPP-adjusted? is it what we should be using as a measure of prosperity? in my limited understanding, median income may be preferable, since it eliminates outliers in countries with large wealth gaps, where a few very folks may monopolize a lot of wealth (like the US!)

2) what other, more specific economic variables or variables associated with prosperity did the okT folks try? literacy? income inequality? family size? i wonder if any of these would produce a closer relationship...

3) what about non-economic variables? the okT folks also have access to data about strength of religious conviction which i suspect would correlate cross-nationally. there must be a way to compare this to other data sets about average religiosity in a given country. which brings us to the second set of issues...

"National" sexual proclivity as a dependent variable

...as measured by okCupid users in a given country, a self-selected population

and there we have the crux of the issue. okT doesn't try to obscure this fact, but i think it's something even more interesting to investigate, and something that quantitative analysis will only get you so far on [resists urge to climb atop methodologies soapbox].

basically, the most pressing issue here is that, for many of the countries shown, the dependent and independent variables are describing two significantly different populations. in a countries like the US or australia, with a high number of internet users and a (larger) social acceptance of internet dating, i think it's fair to say that those individuals willing to get on the internet and declare that they're looking for a random shag may be, if still self-selecting, to some degree representative of a larger population.

but think of other countries, especially developing world countries, where both populations, internet users and internet daters, are smaller. it seems to me, the self-selection bias gets much much stronger in those circumstances. now, this is surely still tied to some measure of economic prosperity, but i think it also implies that, in a lot of these places, we might be looking at a lot of different things: changing social trends and cultural mores, how early adopters of internet technologies are using the unique public/private space online to buck these mores, or again, push change. i small a comparative case study coming on!

anway, this is just off the top of m head this morning. what do other people think? 

i've asked the nice people at okT for their data, although i don't know if they can share it, so maybe we can test some of this stuff later.

 

elegies IV

it seems like every day now, something happens that brings home to me, with a stomach-churning pang, how much i will miss nepal.

i'm the unofficial additional roomie in the house across the road, popping over unannounced to charge my computer from their inverter, a luxury. fortunately, none of the various people who have lived here over the last year and half seem to have a problem with showing up home to find me sitting in their living room. c and i are there now, scrolling through my phone to send a mass text to gauge the social temperature for the night. probably only about a third of the numbers in my phone are people who are still here. i don't know why i haven't erased the outdated ones, and say as much to c, who has been here even longer than i.

"yeah," she says, "my phone's like a graveyard for old friends as well."
except they don't feel dead or gone to me, no matter how bad i've been about keeping in touch.

~

when my parents were here, my dad came along to our local bar to hear a friend's band play. it's one of the first places i ever went out in nepal, but a year a half later, it's like an extension of my living room, my personal nepali cheers. it is seedy, smoky, and dark, with layer upon layer of markered graffiti on the yellow walls; i am convinced i will never find any bar that i like as much, no matter where i go. a huge group of friends has gamely shown up to have a beer and chat to my dad. i, almost greedily, watch their faces and let their conversations wash around me. i am warmed by quiet pleasure. what remarkable, smart, funny people i know, and have known, here. my memory fills in the images of all of the people who aren't here now, who left a month or six months or a year ago, sitting around with us, as if they left yesterday. i wish i could introduce my parents to them, as well, but they'll have to rely on stories, unpaired with faces.

~

we've had a great afternoon, despite the rain. we grilled for my roomie's birthday, and people came in and out all afternoon and evening to eat and drink and talk. i took one last set of pictures of the birthday boy and a close friend of his, who was leaving to go back to australia, and later marveled at the open love on their faces as i scrolled through the photos. by this point, it's gotten dark, and i'm having a side conversation with another friend. he's in a long-distance, cross-cultural relationship, and it is understandably hard. i tell him, although i'm single, i think i know how he feels. i have been lucky enough to have many, many people i love, from college, from childhood, from nepal. they're scattered all over the world now, but i still feel connected to them. it is an exhausting blessing, i say. in my (rare) quiet moments, when i think about them, the connections soothe me, but i also feel as if i'm pouring love through those connections, beginning with me in kathmandu, end emptying in america, australia, spain, england, india, south africa. you sometimes wonder if the supply is unending, or if you'll get to the bottom of the well and wonder just what's left of you.

later that night, people are clearing out. one of my close friends comes over and squeezes me, hard. his cologne is familiar and overwhelming.

"if you don't keep in touch with me, i'm going to come find you," he says. "and take care of yourself. i won't be around to"

i'm surprised. he is a notoriously unsentimental person. it's one of the reasons we get along. "whatever," i say gruffly, "i'm leaving in two months, not tomorrow."

"maybe," he says, "but here, two months is tomorrow."

~

it's not just the people, i find. 

wrestling with my landlord's puppy; smelling the chicken roasting in the kebab shop on the corner; passing the rather startled looking woman's face painted on the sign for the "hair saloon" down the street; cheerfully arguing with cab drivers; making plans to get tea with the owner of the grocery store; the ease of buying veggies on my way home from work; clucking over the unseasonal rain, but seeing the mountain peaks emerge in the distance as the winter pollution is cleared from the air. 

all of these things and a million more overwhelm me with a sudden, dazzling, bewildering feeling of love on a daily basis. maybe it's that this is the first place i've lived for long enough, outside of the pre-existing structures of family or university, to feel like a home i've made for myself. it is, as much as my hometown or my college years, such a large part of who i am, partly because i'm so young. 

but this sense of love and homecoming i feel in kathmandu is inextricably tied to longing for the other homes i've had. while i sit and drink tea at the cafe, just in front of the ganesh statue, the sun hits me a certain way or some song comes on, and i'm suddenly yanked away. i'm tossing my deli-juice soaked apron off at the end of work and heading to the beach on the cape; i'm lying with friends in the courtyard of our residential college, our textbooks still closed as we stare up at the may blossoms against brown stone and iron of the gothic architecture.

the paradox of such simultaneous embededness and dislocation is dizzying.

~

before i left for nepal, i read a poem about kathmandu that a childhood friend's mother had given me. that's nice, i thought. the book stayed on my shelf when i moved here. 

she recently ran into my parents, a small town inevitability, and, learning that my time here was drawing to a close, sent me the poem again via email. this time i read it twice. once to myself, and once to my then roommate, who was leaving the next day for the states. after, we sat together on the porch, quietly, listening to the dogs bark, and, i imagine, feeling the levels in the well fall, and rise, and fall again.

~

SESTINA: HERE IN KATMANDU
Donald Justice (1925-2004)

We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,

As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.

It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!

Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have they to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?

It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.

Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.

i don't think it's possible to forget the mountain.
 
 

perspective: everything's amazing, but nobody's happy.

a gchat conversation between me and a friend who lived in nepal but went back to the states about four months ago...

her: ok, i'll let you go. let's skype sometime
me: yes, when i'm not sick, and at [cafe] writing grants on a saturday, hating life.
her: haha. ooh [cafe] <3
me: no, i hate [cafe] but i had the realization that it is literally the only place in kathmandu [within walking distance] that has consistent internet, electricity and toilet paper.
her: dude, it's so funny how much we focused on that there. but here in america, we have all those things, and it's like...still plenty of things to complain about.

re-watched this, and bracing for the culture shock...

blog pimpin'

two more excellent blogs from friends in nepal:

my friend ben has just finished facilitating the establishment of improved emergency medical services in nepal. he's also a sick dj. check out his descripton of the process here.

simon's a fulbrighter and a nice guy who writes about interesting stuff. check him out here.

kasto moto bhayo: changing body image ideals in developing countries?

i've been meaning to write this particular "wacky cultural gap" post since, literally, the first week i arrived here, but a recently released study makes the whole issue more interesting and pertinent again.

in the most recent issue of cultural anthropology, researchers from ASU  did a nine-site cross cultural survey of attitudes towards weight, and found that there is an overwhelming prevalence of "fat stigma," even in cultures, like american samoa, where attitudes as recently as ten years ago were traditionally considered "fat positive." the researchers credit this to the spread of western (and particularly american) influence and images. i'll leave aside an interrogation of the researchers' methods and findings (for instance: what socio-economic class did respondents belong to?) since the full article is gated [shakes fist at a cruel god], but it certainly seems disheartening.

anyone who's lived in a western country has a pretty robust understanding of "fat stigma". the connotation of the word fat is not limited to physical size, or even physical attractiveness, but has moral implications. if you are fat, you are lazy, undisciplined, stupid, and on and on (it goes without saying that i'm not a fan of this).

so it is understandably shocking to arrive in nepal and be told how fat, or moto, you are by as diverse a group of people as (off the top of my head, from like the last couple months): your coworkers, your cab driver, your landlords, the guy at the bakery, the lady at the tailor, and random folks you've just met. and just wait until a guy you've sort of been seeing suggests you buy men's jeans if you can't find a pair that fits. it's not just about weight, either. people will tell you look beautiful, or more commonly, sick, tired, or unhappy. frank commentary on appearance is par for the social course. but it is, of course, "fat," which strikes the most alarming chord with those of us raised in western cultures, especially the states. after all, we're the nation that spawned an entire genre of mortal insult predicated on impugning the honor of one's progenitor based on their BMI.

of course, we seasoned foreigner nepal-wallahs, cultural experts that we are, tell ourselves, chuckling uncertainly and sucking in our guts, "well of course that's not a bad thing here. in their culture, it means you're happy, or rich. really, it's very flattering. heh heh."

well, sort of.

it's true that, traditionally, the nepali word that translates literally to "fat", moto, had the connotation of being happy, healthy, wealthy, and attractive. dublo means thin, but also potentially sickly or weak. but my impression is that these categories are shifting, particularly among younger generations. it's unclear to what degree nepal fits into the ASU researchers' thesis. i would say that it basically does, if at one step removed. i agree, if the basic thesis is that economic power breeds cultural power breeds changing understandings and practice, either acquiescent or resistant to the hegemony*. as a nit-picky thing though, i would say that if nepal is becoming influenced by new "westernized" norms, it is via india, and in the case of body image, especially bollywood.

for instance, the first time i came in wearing nepali clothing, my coworkers complimented me on how nice i looked, with some degree of surprise, including a couple of peer-coworkers who had reacted skeptically to my inquiries about wearing kurta when i arrived, about six months earlier.

"but you didn't think i should get one before," i said.

"well, you just...you were shaped very differently then, much differently than nepali women," he hedged.

knowing the score by this point, as well as how much weight six months of chronic diarrhea and two field trips to remote nepal will inspire, i laughed. "pretty fat then, huh?"

"oh," he said, laughing with relief, "SO fat."

we chatted more about the nepali vs. western ideals of body image, and one agreed that the "traditional" understandings of "fat" and "thin" were more or less true.

"of course," he said, "the ladies prefer to be thin."


this is maybe a bit of a throw away post, but it serves as a  potential jumping off point for discussion about food security, nutrition, and public health in nepal (for instance, the growing diabetes epidmic). more importantly, it is implicated what i think are really interesting questions of "modernity," "tradition," and particularly trans-national flows of power in a country like nepal, which has seen exponential rates of social and political change in the last ten years, and shows no signs of slowing down.

*bonus: for a shockingly depoliticized and deliciously condescending view of both "traditional" and "changing" standards of beauty around the world, check out this oprah slide show.