new blog!

hey folks, so i sort of let this trail off a bit as a traveled to turkey and the UK after leaving nepal, then, the very day i arrived back in the states, BAM. i got hired for a job in monrovia, liberia, where i arrived about a month ago, and i'll be living for the next two years.

thanks for reading, and i hope you'll subscribe to my new blog to follow me in monrovia.

elegies VI

maybe this one isn't so much an elegy, but it's self-indulgent, so let's roll with it.

i've been packing up all of my stuff recently, sorting out my own possessions from borrowed ones, practicing non-attachment as i wrench myself away from that old pair of torn black leggings that are practically indecent to wear. i came across a book that a friend loaned me a while back, a translation of mirza ghalib. among other things, ghalib was a master of the ghazal, a highly prescribed poetic form originating in the arab world and traveling to south asia in the 12th century.

for the first time in my life, i started going all insomniac this year. it's anti-fun. on the bright side, i got through an awful lot of books on tape. one night, after i finished reading some ghalib, i also got to toying with one phrase in my head, and decided to try writing a ghazal. it's, um, not easy.  from wikipedia:

Details of the form

• A ghazal is composed of five or more couplets.
• The second line of each couplet (or sher) in a ghazal usually ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, known as a radif, preceded by a rhyme known as the qaafiyaa. In Arabic, Persian and Turkic the couplet is termed a bayt and the line within the bayt is called a misra. In the first couplet, both lines end in the rhyme and refrain so that the ghazal's rhyme scheme is AA BA CA etc.
• Enjambment across lines or between couplets is not permitted in a strict ghazal; each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself.
• All the couplets, and each line of each couplet, must share the same meter.
• Ghazal is simply the name of a form, and is not language-specific. Ghazals exist, for example, in Arabic, Bengali, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Malayalam, Punjabi, Kurdish and Pashtu and many other languages.
• In languages of Indian sub-continent ghazals occasionally contain no radif. Such ghazals are termed "ġair-muraddaf" ghazal. The pre-Islamic Arabian qasida was in monorhyme; like the rest of the qasida, the ghazal itself did not have a radif.
• Although every sher may be an independent poem in itself, the shers may share the same theme or even display continuity of thought. This is called a musalsal ghazal, or "continuous ghazal". The ghazal "chupke chupke raat din aasUU bahaanaa yaad hai" is a famous example of a musalsal ghazal.
• In modern Urdu poetry, there are a few ghazals which do not follow the restriction that the same beher must be used in both the lines of a sher. But even in these ghazals, qaafiyaa and, usually, radif are present.
• By placing his or her takhallus (pen name) in the maqta or final sher, the poet traditionally attempted to secure credit for his or her work. Poets often made elegant use of their takhallus in the maqta.

anyway, i just found it stuck in the ghalib book when i went to put it aside to return it. it's a work in progress (not that i'll ever finish it), but insofar as it's my blog and i'm doing the transitional emotional rollercoaster, i figure i can indulge myself and post a poem i wrote about nepal, on the theme of beginnings and ending. it's after the jump.

मेरो पहिलो आफै पाकेको खाना: my first self-cooked daal bhat

oh daal bhat...you, i'll miss the most.
but, fortunately, i can now cook you all on my very own.

daal bhat is about 50% of what you need to know about nepal. for all of the ethnic, linguistic, and culinary diversity in nepal, daal bhat is the common denominator, the staple meal for the vast majority of the population. it consists, at its most basic, of a MASSIVE mound of rice (bhat), and a watery legume soup (daal). standard additions are some kind of curried vegetable (tarkaari), sauteed greens (saag), one or two of an enormous variety of pickle or spicy sauce (achhar), and possibly meat and/or a little yogurt (dahi). it's eaten twice a day, mid-morning and early evening, served on a big metal plate, all in heaps and/or small metal bowls around the mound of rice. you eat it by pouring the dal on the rice bit by bit, and then MUSHING EVERYTHING TOGETHER AND EATING WITH YOUR HANDS, which is flippin' awesome. you're fully expected to have multiple portions of everything.

anyway, shockingly, i never cooked it for myself at any point in the last two years. firstly, i live in fear of pressure cookers. there's a reason they get used as improvised bombs. furthermore, it's pretty labor intensive (plan on two hours prep and cooking) and so ubiquitous that it really just makes more sense to pop down the street to literally any restaurant. i also have yet to find a good recipe online, so learning how to cook it would have required a lesson that i never seemed to get around to. but i recently bought my own copy of a taste of nepal, a cookbook i've gotten for several people as a present. the other night, both my roomie and i were CRAVING dal bhat, so we just went for it. we think it turned out pretty well for a first attempt, but by that point it was about 9pm, and we may have lost perspective in our starving state.

in any case, full recipes after the jump (hopefully i won't get a cease and desist letter from ms. patak).

missed (?) opportunities and musings on privilege

wowza have i been neglectful of this blog. mostly, i've been trying to stave off the panic of leaving nepal (in about three weeks!) with no job lined up-- both through sheer force of will, and the more practical measure of applying for lots and lots of jobs. i'm trying to remember, though, that i'm plenty young. even if i don't score a job that's both interesting to me and a more conventional/financially secure career move, i can go farm, and get some hands on experience to continue a career in food security and food systems, or i'll give this freelance journalism thing a shot.

i was thinking about the latter option when i saw that one of my favorite feminist blogs was having a short fiction contest where the only constraints were a 500-word limit and a female main character. i figured this was a perfect opportunity to a) get writing and b) get used to putting my writing out to be judged. i would work up a few pieces, ask some friends for comments, and submit the best. i had written one and started a second, when i went to check the deadline and saw that they had closed the contest early, due to overwhelming response. bummer

then i thought, wait a sec, the first piece was set in nepal. i already wrote the thing, and i can still practice getting used to putting it out there (admittedly to a much kinder audience)....

ANYWAY. it's after the jump. it's set sometime in the early 2000s in ktm, and it's (supposed to be) riffing on the theme of privilege. 

today in affirmation

i love blogger stats, especially when they tell me that someone has stumbled across this blog, repository of my inner thoughts and casual intellectual exercises, the venue through which i present to the world my experiences in nepal, by searching the term "new nepali sex blogs". so yeah. there's that.

recently spotted in my neighborhood

a nepali/korean restaurant that i pass on the way to work has just renamed itself: soul food garden restaurant.

"fabulous fab world" garment shop is getting a fresh coat of bright pink paint.

i saw a kid on the back of a motorbike wearing a tshirt that looked like it was for a death metal band. i am 98% sure that the name on the shirt was "MISHEGOSS".


god, am i going to miss this place.

initial thoughts on obl's death: d'tzach adash b'achav

i've been watching the responses to the death of bin laden with interest and, often, sadness.

let's be totally clear: i, too, rejoice at the death of bin laden. i don't care that he was killed, rather than caught and made to stand trial for his crimes. those crimes, both legal and moral, the promotion of hatemongering and extremism and terrible acts of murder and violence mean that his death is both a moral and strategic victory for all of us.

however, i think it's essential that our celebrations be dignified and leavened with a little solemnity. in pursuit of the necessary justice that bin laden's death brings, we should appreciate and remember the sacrifices of armed forces personnel pursuing him, and we should certainly remember the innocent lives of iraqi, afghani, and pakistani civilians that were lost, and those who have been displaced from their homes, possibly never to return.

last week, the jewish festival of passover concluded. during passover, jews recite the story of our liberation from enslavement in egypt, our departure and first steps towards the holy land. it is, as so many of our holidays are, a celebration of our survival. yet, in the heart of the seder, during the retelling of our triumph, we recite the ten plagues that god rained down upon the egyptians to effect our escape. at each plague's name, we remove a drop of wine with our fingertips from the one the four ritual cups of wine consumed at the seder, to signify that, while we rejoice, we feel sorrow for the suffering of our oppressors that was required to set us free. later, as the egyptians pursue the jews across the red sea, god drowns them. they sing a song of praise, and the angels start to join in. god reprimands them, saying, "the works of my hands [my children, the egyptians] are drowning, and you wish to sing praises?"*

but this isn't about religion, and it's certainly not about politics. it's about humanity. it's about acknowledging that triumph comes with a price. it's about rejecting simplistic narratives that would say otherwise, and lead us down a path that brings us dangerously close to disregarding and devaluing the lives of other humans, which is, after all, what separates us from people like bin laden in the first place.

*thanks to dan for posting this in his fb status, and getting me thinking.

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.

29 march quicklinks

i'm too distracted for a theme right now, but you'll get a treat if you read all the way through to the end...

my friend suren is the lead singer of a pretty popular nepali rock outfit, karma band. he's in the states right now, and is performing it boston. check it out:

with that said, go because the concert should be fun, NOT to donate to japan. smarter, more experienced people than i have have already talked about why the rush to give to japan is a bad thing. in fact, the japanese government has restricted the donations it will take, so do your research if you want to give. while my parents were here, we were talking about what impact means, and i cited donations to japan as a major example of how donors need to stop getting what they think they want, and be educated about what is really needed.

~

seriously, if you like telenovelas, you'll LOVE hindi serials. emily does a break down of her new favorite, where bollywood gets on the sexy vampire bandwagon. and if that's not enough south asian cinematic goodness for you, check out the truly glorious awkward bollywood tumblr [h/t the ajnabee].

~

for those of us who can't get the basketball on tv (and have a robust nerdy streak), check out march madness for development economists and democrats vs. dictators.

~

a view from the cave has a good critique of the nyt coverage of voluntourism. he's basically said it, but still... it's amazing. it's like completely different people wrote the introduction, which has the most glancing, lip-service note on the critics of voluntourism, and the actual description of the trips. for instance...
intro:

"But the idea of “volunteer vacations” has been met with controversy: many not-for-profits say that the logistics of putting people on the ground disrupt the flow of care, and that fly-by-night foreigners are stealing long-term jobs from locals. These eight organizations are challenging that perception."

and, later:

"Project Brazil places volunteers in the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro for 15 days to assist at a day care center with children 6 years and younger. Community Development in Peru sends volunteers to build efficient traditional cooking stoves and work in a women’s weaving co-op near Cuzco."

[does incredulous double take]

for more voluntourism discussion, check out my friend david's article, published in the latest SINHAS, on "The Anatomy of Ephemeral Healthcare: "Health Camps" and Short Term Medical Voluntourism in Remote Nepal" [update: forgot it's not available online. send me an email and i'll see if i can hook you up]. seriously, homeboy spent eight months in humla. he deserves a medal.

 ~

and in the latest from our corporate overlords...the US gvt bends over for GE, both the company and the crop varieties. i am not hopeful for the results of the wal-mart sex discrimination case, which gives the supreme court the chance to "keep up with the joneses", as it were, in terms of america's hottest two political trends of the year...whereby the only thing you can do more intensely than love corporate influence is hate women.

~

on the bright side, there's always delicious, delicious pop music. trust me, watch this video. it's brilliant, and not even in a rebecca black so bad it's good kind of way:

elegies III

i don't know whether it's coming from a house or a store, but there is one place on my walk home from work, just as i come up this little slope, past the intersection, where i am always engulfed in the smell of fresh ground cumin.

 

"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 will never use pre-ground spices ever again.

coming soon to a computer near you...

parents visiting (yay) + being sick (boo) + work nuttiness (meh) = posting negligence.
BUT i'll be back later this week with all sorts of goodies, including: reflections on jim ferguson 20 years later, further elegies (SO EMO), a veritable orgy of quicklinks, and, a higher power (my boss and the fine folks at WFP) willing, an update on the research deal.

for now, though, big ups and happy spring to you all.

elegies II

i hadn't planned on, well, planning my next move, but a few things cropped up on my RSS feeds, and so i applied. now i have nightmares about interviews. it's overwhelming to consider the sheer number of possibilities (not to mention constraints), and to play out the the domino-effect that my choices now may have on my whole life path. i do find that this paralysis in the face of options is mitigated by my youth, relative to many of my other friends and fellow itinerants in kathmandu. one of these recently said:

"The other evening, I found myself once again wondering what it was that I was being called to do with my life and I decided that it was to walk in the light.

This afternoon I started this blog because I wanted to know what, exactly, we meant by that"

check it out.


"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. 

elegies I

i'm having a beer with my roommate and another friend on the front porch of my house. my parents are arriving in kathmandu the next day. i'm excited, if slightly anxious about justifying my last year and a half of life decisions to them. i describe to my friends (s. is nepali and j. is an aussie who's been here long enough to know the ropes) some of the ways i've tried to describe life in kathmandu to my parents.

"i tell them, it's like... in the states, if you were to, say,  accidentally step on a dead animal or get run off the sidewalk by a motorcycle bearing down on you from behind...that would be an extraordinarily bad day, like a need-to-go-debrief-with-a-friend-over-multiple-beers level of disruptive. here, it just...is. unpleasant perhaps, but nothing out of the question"

s. laughs and j. says, "well, i'm ok with all of it, except not having electricity when the [cricket] world cup is on." he holds his computer up, squinting at the screen as he tries to register a better wifi connection.

the power cuts out. without the light pollution, the stars are brighter than you would see in any urban area in the states. i hug my knees closer to my chest.  from late february through mid-april, kathmandu has dry and warm and bright, playing-hooky to lie in the sun kind of weather, but it is still gets a little chilly at night.

"mm yes. we do lead a charmed life," i say, taking a sip. i am very much serious.

"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.

17th march quicklinks

this week: scandal! mystery! but mostly... links that really grind my gears. featuring...

MISOGYNY!
...yet more victim-blaming in texas and elsewhere.
...so you think workplace discrimination is dead, and feminism obsolete?

POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY!
...yes, it's much easier to cut the $600 child tax credit than raise taxes on the top 1% of taxpayers who might make a campaign contribution, isn't it gov. snyder?
...i can't even think of something sassy, i'm so furious.

CORPORATE INTERESTS AND THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR HEALTH AND OUR EARTH!
...wait, you mean that your obvious cost-saving strategies in farmed meat production might have massive externalities that will be passed on to me? NO WAY.
...but, but... agrobiodiversity preservation and integrated smallholder farming systems aren't nearly so profitable!

INTELLECTUAL LAZINESS!
..."the Japanese have resources because they are rich, and it was their social solidarity that helped get them there". wait, say what there, easterly?

fortunately, i also discovered the good man project magazine, "a gathering place for thoughtful men with a conscience," which i suspect will be a soothing addition to my google reader.

through the google scholar rabbit hole...

...it gets odd. like foucault meets UFO kinda odd.

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