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.