My book has more bookmarks than pages

I was at a little bar in downtown Plano this weekend with a girlfriend when an older man, leaning on a crutch, wearing a sweaty, stained T-shirt, and rocking some seriously uncombed hair, jerkily walked over to us and told my girlfriend that she needs to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. She was spouting off her opinions on healthcare, particularly how the government should play no role in it (“You got to understand, I’m from Philadelphia. I grew up learning exactly what our founding fathers meant for this country to be. I am a true patriot at heart.”) I hadn’t really said anything, because honestly, I figure I don’t really know shit about healthcare and what the government should do about it. I understand her viewpoint, which is likely shared by the solid majority of my family, and I know that it is rooted in an unwavering belief that free-market systems are the best choice for the people, sometimes because of the results, sometimes because of the principle of the thing, and sometimes because of both. Anyway, this man told us that he got healthcare in France and in Costa Rica to help him with his disability that he could not have gotten here, and that it had in his mind shot a hole in the entire theory my girlfriend was espousing. I could tell that not only did my girlfriend disagree with him, she was creeped out by him. So when he pulled out a pack of French cigarettes (“what Sartre smoked”) and asked if we wanted one, she said, “No, thanks, I’ve got to get back inside.” But me? Well, I respected that my friend wasn’t interested in hanging out with some strange older clearly-unwashed man, but sometimes you just have this instinct or lack thereof- I don’t know, something- that says to you, “No. I want to hear what this man has to say.” So he lit up a cigarette as my friend walked inside (giving me a bit of an eye as if to say, are you sure, girl? A good friend worries about you), and he began to tell me a story.

He was traveling with his girlfriend in the south of France, and they were going to Spain to meet up with some good friends of theirs. He described to me some of the places and people he met, his anticipation of things to come in Spain. And when he returned to France, he was going to study art and architecture. But as they were driving, another car hit them, killing his girlfriend and leaving him paralyzed in a French hospital for months. He was devastated, he said. Devastated. “But what helped me was when I went to go get this special treatment they had in Costa Rica.” He pulled down the collar of his shirt just a bit to show me a deep scar running across his neck and collarbone. “Yeah, I felt really sorry for myself, and then one day I saw this young woman, and she had a limp, too. And you know, you know how, man, that culture is just so patriarchal. It’s terrible, how some of the women there are treated. So I figure maybe her husband or someone beat her, and that’s why she was hurt. So I went up to her and I told her,’ you know, I understand what it’s like to be disabled now and how horrible it feels, and no pressure or anything untoward, but if you ever want to talk about it, I want you to know you could talk to me.’ And she looked at me and she said, ‘When I was eight years old, a group of men broke into my house one night and killed my mother. Then they gang-raped me.’ And my face went like this-” As he acted it out, his eyes widened and his jaw went slack with the look of someone who has just realized that they don’t know shit. “And twenty years later, here I am with my face still like that.” He took the last draw on his cigarette and put it out. “So now I send her $100 a month, but she doesn’t know who it’s from. I told her cousin to just say she’d won a contest or something. It’s just, man, most of us don’t even know how horrible it could be.”

There was along pause, and then I felt like I wanted him to know that I at least sort of understood what he meant, so I told him that sometimes I work with crime victims getting special visas, and sometimes the stories I hear are just so sad that it makes me feel so lucky no matter how upset with my life I was before. “Yeah,” he said, but I don’t think he really heard me. There was another pause, and he went to sit down on the bench (“Sorry, I can’t stand for very long”) and told some joke about Jesus. My friend came out looking for me, so I said goodbye to the man and went back inside. At the table, my girlfriend said, “I was getting a little worried about you out there. Sorry, but he just seemed really creepy.” “No,” I said. “He was actually pretty cool.”

And I think that the reason why I’m posting this after having abandoned my blog for a few months is that it somehow (oh, I can’t quite explain it, but I’ll try) sums up exactly how I’ve been feeling lately and why I haven’t been writing at all. I just have been overwhelmed, basically, with the process of trying to figure out what I think about the world. And what I want to do. And like, who I want to be and shit. I think one thing one day and a few months later I’ve learned that it’s all been naïveté, ignorance, immaturity, or just a phase. I can’t commit to any ideologies or theories about anything, because I’m scared I’ll just find out it was all wrong a few months later- so why make any decisions based on it now? But life is life, which means decisions have to be made along the way. So I’ve been trying to just go off instinct.

When I was little (and I’m sure I’m certainly not the only one), I wanted to fly. I mean, I really, really wanted it. I drew some wings- they looked like angels’ wings- and cut them out. I asked my aunt to tape them onto my back. I went outside, climbed to the top of our slide, and oh my goodness, the exhilaration I felt in that moment, knowing that I was about to fly. But it turned out, it didn’t really seem to matter how badly I wanted it. No matter how earnest I was, how heart-wrenching it was to think there was this thing I wanted so much that I could simply never have… Well, at some point, I must have come to terms with that. So I have some hope, maybe a sliver, that this urge I have - to conquer all the things I want to think and do and see, the thousands of books to read, the thousands of things and places to visit, the emotions and experiences to have, man there is just SO MUCH TO LEARN AND UNDERSTAND AND EMPATHIZE WITH- will be an urge I can one day come to terms with. Or, I don't know, maybe not. Maybe I shouldn't. It's just another something to figure out.

And in the meantime, I can just remember how lucky I am to have what I do have.

Keepin' It Classy with Michelle Obama

I hope I, too, can be a classy, intelligent, compassionate woman.

At Anacostia High, where children walk through metal detectors every day and only 21 percent of students read proficiently last year, Tiara Chance, 18, was surprised that Mrs. Obama had decided to visit.

“We don’t deserve it,” she said. “People are fighting and cussing all the time around here. Who would want to be around that?”

At Mary’s Center, a health clinic that serves a predominantly immigrant community, Akrem Muzemil, 16, who dreams of becoming an engineer, asked the first lady flat out, “Like, why did you want to come out here to meet us?”

Mrs. Obama told him, “I think it’s real important for young kids, particularly kids from communities without resources, to see me.” ...

At a school’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo this month, the first lady urged students to get to know the Capitol and the White House.

“That space is your space,” Mrs. Obama said. “It’s your democracy, as much as it is anyone else’s.”

Precious

I am very excited to see this.

in favor of music in public schools

a kiss in Paris

From "Paris 2e, one of my favorite blogs.

(When can I go back, and will the D'orsay be open this time?)

Israel: Reflecting on Israeli-Palestinian Relations

On Global Voices today are several Israeli bloggers contemplating the relationships between Israelis and Palestinians.

All of them have interesting things to say, but the one that really caught my eye was Bernard Avishai's entry on Israeli soldiers (can I hate the effects that Israel's policies have, can I abhor especially its military policies, can I hate what individual soldiers do, and still have empathy?):

Let me get this straight. We take tens of thousands of 18 and 19-year-olds, young people who are little more than children themselves, and at a time of life when showing the utmost cool is a kind of sexual ante; a time when ideas about the world are largely received wisdoms; when bodies are at their utmost strength but so is the fear of death, which only reinforces the fear of displaying cowardice; when the people from whom wisdoms are received are parents or mentors loved to the utmost; when minds are just intimidated enough about life's scrum to feel utmost gratitude for family and commonwealth--when the desire to prove one's loyalty is at its most intense.

Then we take these youth--for God's sake, kids who can barely even remember the time of Rabin's assassination--and tell them that the Arabs, deep down, will never want a Jewish state in the neighborhood; that, in any case, the land is sacred, and giving ground is an utmost sin of Jewish law, as is showing mercy to those who would kill you; that "Oslo" offered Palestinians a deal with utmost generosity, but that they came back with terrorism nevertheless; that (though this much has been obvious) terrorism can come in any form, male and female, young and old; that protecting our civilians from random cruelties is the reason they are there.


We tell them, moreover, that the civilians they are facing at least tolerated, or even encouraged, the terrorism they must now root out, which is why terrorists are allowed to blend in; that these Arabs are secretly all waiting and hoping for Iran, the new Amalek, to incinerate Tel-Aviv; that if the world had not flinched from hitting at Hitler in 1938, the utmost tragedy would have been prevented; that, anyway, the strategic goal is to reestablish deterrence, which means scaring the shit out of Arabs, so that they will finally accept the fact that, as former chief of staff Moshe Yaalon put it, they are a "defeated" people; oh, and that our great friends in the Bush administration are about to leave office, so time is of the utmost importance, too.

Then, after our children have killed and killed for us, we turn around and tell them they did not take the utmost care in trying to save civilian lives; that "this involves taking some risk"--that if they were braver, more willing to risk their own or their buddies' deaths, they would not have violated the "norm" of combat--in effect, that if they were more worthy, they would not be war criminals.

We know all of the things; time to party, bro

My friend put on her website (like her, it is whimsical and clever and comes with- for what it is worth- my stamp of approval) this explodingdog:

She said it made her smile, but it did not make me smile. Actually it made me sad.

It also made me wonder if these deeply painful personal conflicts...are a luxury. And that made me sad, too.