(500) Days of Summer

is a downer. Don't see it unless you want to feel emotions.

Today I sensed Forever. He is not, as feared, a jump into a black and endless pit; but rather he is reaching, reaching reaching, getting past your own fingertips, into blue steel grey.

I haven't known a place to have such a clear demarcation between cloudy and not cloudy; here, today, it is monster and not monster, the difference.


A little after crossing from Louisiana into Texas, I noticed it was there--the sky again a tangible entity above me. You know in elementary school PE, the day you play with a parachute? You get a chance to run underneath the billowing cloth while your classmates hold it up. And then above you something is breathing and the space is aglow with the red, turquoise light filtering through. You want that moment t
o last forever, before the fabric deflates around you, slowly and then faster and closer.
Driving into Texas, I didn't notice the parachute surging up, but suddenly I am under its blue blue blue. I cannot shake the sensation that it will collapse around me.

Today, the blue made way for grey. It is the shade of grey you feel when you hold thumb to thumb, finger to finger, pushing them together up and down. And it's as if you're rubbing your fingers against a sheet of metal when you do it long enough. It is Forever.

New Style Icon--Bloggling Superficiality

I went shopping today and happily I am past looking at only "teacher clothes." I'm secure enough about work/kids to go to school not necessarily dressed "like a teacher"; I want lightweight florals to take the role of pencil skirts in my current day-to-day wear. Part of this is because I will soon be moving away from the warmth of Texas and love the idea of having an expansive stockpile of summer dresses to adapt to the winter weather with leggings and boots and scarves and jackets. (Almost bought a faux-leather jacket today, by the way.)

As I looked past teaching clothes and towards winter clothes, I saw a little further towards the possibility of journalist clothes. The Rolodex of TV Journalists flipped through my head and I was disappointed at the prospect of matching pencil skirts and suit jackets with old lady necklaces.

However, the image of a prominent journalist from my
childhood suddenly appeared in my head, and I had my new style icon: April O'Neil from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Basically, I need a belted yellow jumpsuit and a pair of white leather boots as soon as I get out of graduate school and into the work force.
In all seriousness, a yellow windbreaker with the sleeves rolled up and some skinny jeans would be a hell of look for me. ASAP, at that.

Oh, and I need the white boots for sure.

New York Times, Orientalism, are you kidding me?

I'll be honest, Mr. Kristof, I didn't read all of your article The Women's Crusade, so maybe I don't have the right to criticize it. The thing is, I got so disgusted with its new-fangled orientalism, that I couldn't do more than skim most of the piece. I don't mean this to mean precisely what Edward Said meant by the term Orientalism, but effectively what he meant by it: the West portrays the East as an inferior Other, the Orient embodying all the awful that the Occident is not, creating a "system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence... but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting" (Said, Orientalism). The "purpose" being another reason for the U.S. and "the West" to continue its paternal push for cultural, political, and economic hegemony. Kristof does, after all, ultimately argue that the U.S. should throw money at women in developing countries to give them a boost, help them become part of the global economy. Remember how Jane Eyre decided not to go to India to help the Hindustanis? Remember how she had her own patriarchy to contend with? Yeah, exactly.

The article opens with the above photo of some dejected-looking Pakistani females. It goes on to explain how the woman was abused by her dead-beat husband until she got a microloan and made a ton of money embroidering. Now she "She exudes self-confidence... doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband." Then why the photo of her looking so godawfulmiserable? Because a vieled brown woman looking hopeless better serves your purposes? In a similar was as does describing an Indian girl as having "chocolate skin" and the African woman as having a "high forehead and tight cornrows". None of the American women in the really great article on women in the military are described with such painstaking physicality. There are photographs of the two women alongside the article and yet their exotic, swarthy physiques preceed their acheivement and ambitions.

What got me first and gets me most about the article, however, is that in their description of "a large slice of the world" where "girls are uneducated and women marginalized", any chunk of the United States where this occurs is not remotely mentioned. Of course, with me not being a complete idiot, I know that the United States wouldn't be in the scope of an article aiming to promote the spending American foriegn aid dollars on women and girls. That said, as an avid reader of the New York Times, I also know that doesn't often focus on the plight, the oppression, and oft-miserable situation of American women and girls. For example, a sidebar in this article declares that "there are 5 thousand honor killings a year, the majority in the Muslim world." Ignoring the fact that "the Muslim world" is a ridiculous notion (I'm Muslim; Paris has a ton of Muslims; India has a TON of Muslims and isn't remotely a Muslim country; etc); ignoring the fact that non-Muslim women die from honor killings (but it's implied that honor-killings are Muslim); I have yet to see the Nytimes mention that over 1100 women (about three each day, according the the National Organization of Women) in the United States are killed by abusive spouses or boyfriends. Considering that the vague notion of "the Muslim World" has a significantly larger population than the United States, I'd say it's ridiculous to harp on one (and oh, American news loves harping on honor killings, which are regionally and culturally defined) and not much mention the other. And speaking of political and legal systems that work against women (which of course exist sooo much in the Third World), just read this article, When Domestic Violence Laws Don't Work from O Magazine, and you'll see that we have one of them.

All of this is not to say, of course, that a lot of the awful sexist stuff that goes down in Third World countries isn't a bunch of bullshit that we should just let happen. It is just astounding to me how much awful sexist stuff goes down here that we just let happen. Why the constant outrage over honor killings and so little against domestic violence? Why so much focus on educating poor women around the world, and so little on making sure my female students feel empowered enough to make sound sexual decisions and become effective heads-of-household in the future (they're more likely to end up young, high school dropouts, unmarried with children)? For goodness' sake, the books girls eat up in this country, the Twilight series, are about a girl who choses marriage and a violent vampire pregnancy over college. Let's not even bring up the trafficking of women and girls being so epidemic around the world, when Shelbyville, Kentucky had its very own brothel of sex-slaves from Latin America. And we want to help other countries with gender egalitarism and female empowerment?

Again, this is not to say that Kristof or the New York Times are misrepresenting or wrong about the women they seek to help. I have no doubt I am significantly better off with my family in the United States as a woman than I would have been with my family in India. But had I been raised in India, with most any middle or upper class family, I'd be likely be better off, socially, academically, and economically, than if I'd been born into a coal-mining family in Appalachia. But I don't think these things warrant such comparisons because that's a slippery slope to racist, regionalist, classist, untestable generalizations. Well actually I'm already down that slope, but whatever.

Kristof writes, "Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation." I think it's awesome the women's issues make front-page news. But not when it's only about the horrible conditions brown and black women live in around the world. Not at the expense of the man women lurking in our own attics. Again, it is orientalist that this happens--the portrayal of "Eastern" women as needing our help, as being ruled over by tyrants hasn't changed in centuries. It's an unreasonable and unwarranted focus, but its one that distracts us from our own problems.

I'm losing steam. It just makes me so mad.

"Atticus Finch and the Limits of Southern Liberalism"

This awesome article from the New Yorker is immensely worth reading. Gender and race in the South? A reference to Charles Dickens? Now these are a few of my favorite things.

Things I have recently observed...

1. Lightening striking the Sears Tower at night. There was a cracking noise and sparks!
2. Indiana, at times, smells like hotdog water.
3. A removed mountain top.
4. A crow of a rooster waking me up in the morning.
5. The taste of unwashed, Appalachian blackberries, as fresh as a bear would eat.

Omar Souleyman

The other day I heard Bjork on NPR. She oh-so-whimsically introduced me to Omar Souleyman, a Syrian musician. I could listen to his distinctly Arab take on techno probably forever. I don't know the name of the traditional stringed instrument you usually hear in Arabic music, but Souleyman replaces it with a synth. Further, as you see in this rock and roll video , another man often whispers lyrics in his ears, which are then added to the song.

In Bjork's significantly more endearing words:

When they are really warmed up and going for it at a good-times party, Harbi stands next to him on stage and chain-smokes. Then he will whisper poetry in his ear that he's writing at the moment. Omar will sing it immediately in the microphone and run around the room, exciting people there. I thought it was quite exciting for a poet and an emcee to work together.

The collaboroation, however, doesn't strike me as particularly innovative--I grew up watching qawalli videos with my dad, where they often write-sing poetry as they go. That said, those performers didn't wear leather jackets and aviators with their old school mustaches and dishdashas (they also didn't really wear dishdashas, since qawals aren't Arab). It's also a little like freestyling, except that Souleyman uses someone else's lyrics.

To summarize:
1) expect to hear the song "Leh Jani" on repeat in my precense and at my wedding. I might even try to get everyone to do the dance--it will be a "good-times party".
2) listen to Bjork on NPR's You Must Hear This; even if you don't care for Souleyman's music, her voice is so irresistably sweet and cute.