The 31 hour day.

Tags

airports, flying, journal, nonfiction, travel

I’m at the Beirut airport with T-45 minutes until boarding to Moscow, and T-25 minutes left of free wifi, so I gotta make this quick.

I’m about the enter some kind of disruption in the space-time continuum, within which today, Wednesday 18, 2013, will be 31 hours long–and I will be awake and traveling for at least 23 of those hours, if nothing goes wrong.

Uncertain of whether I will have access to wifi or American power outlets, I’ll write this now and call it a night. Or a day. Both. It’s going to be a very long both.

The Market

Tags

journal, Lebanon, local market, Middle East, nonfiction, souks, travel

We walked though an old souk in Tripoli today that I’ve never been to before. It was the market, and even though everyone was speaking Arabic, and the stone corridors were thousands of years old, it did oddly remind me off the Haymarket in Boston, and other American street markets I’ve encountered over the years.

The smell of dried Zataar mingled with the scent of freshly roasted nuts, right next to gutted raw fish and a skinned lamb hanging from a butcher hook. The open street was hooded by haphazard tarps and rusted sheet-metal, both of which helped to enclose the smoke from cigarettes dangling from the mouths of customers and vendors alike.

My grandfather knew I would like to visit such a place. It was the perfect thing to see my last day here.

And for my last night, I must try to sleep.

“Not all who wander…”

Tags

family, friendship, journal, lifestyle, nonfiction, road trip, suicide, travel, writing, writing 2013

In two days, at this hour, I will be aboard an airplane en route to Moscow, ultimately bound for New York City, where my boyfriend will be waiting to take me home.

Home. I haven’t seen my parents or siblings in three months, but that isn’t anything new. I’ve gone just as long during the months I’ve been at school–or even longer during the summers I stayed in Boston to work. I miss them, sure, and my boyfriend and friends as well. But every minute that passes I wonder if I’m ready to go home.

It’s closing in on the end of the year, so naturally I’ve begun thinking about where I was at the beginning of 2013. Well, I was traveling in an old Honda Civic with one of my best friends across the southern belt of America. It’s odd to think, I spent the first month and the last three months of this year doing very different kinds of traveling–both for the first time in my life. It’s set a very high standard for the rest of my years, for certain.

But I bring this up because towards the end of the road trip, and for a few days after I returned to Boston, I felt a great disappointment that the adventure had ended. I had adjusted to life continually on the move, and whatever discomforts living out of a car posed were nothing compared to the feeling of freedom I was experiencing for the first time. I could live out of a single backpack, I had proved to myself, for a month–which meant I could do it for a whole lot longer if I needed to. All of the other things I had collected over the years, I realized, I could simply leave behind.

That was easy. It was going back to that apartment, filled with stuff, that was a shock. And, of course, going back to work and school full time–though I found that last semester to be more rewarding than the entirety of my aggregated college experience up to that point.

But whatever dismay I was feeling from getting off the road was quickly displaced by grief. After the first day of classes, I found out that my best friend from childhood had committed suicide, and since then, that’s what every feeling I had for the rest of the year was about. If I was sad, I was doubly sad, because I missed her. If I screwed something up, it was two-fold because I had also let her down.

Even when I was happy, my smile would always turn into a sad one, wishing she could have been there to share the joy. “If there had only been moments like this,” I would think to myself, “maybe she wouldn’t have left like she did.”

These thoughts are debilitating, I know, but I have them none the less.

Getting back to my point–I’m about to leave Lebanon, after three months on a kind of solitary writer’s retreat, to go back to that place–so filled will stuff and outlined in memories. I’ll have to start applying for jobs and paying student loans and, for a short time at least, start living with my parents again, in a room that I’ve never lived in filled with boxes–some of which I haven’t seen since high-school.

It won’t be so bad. I’m already planning to leave in June, for the west coast again, this time fore a more permanent move. But nothing is really permanent–not for me anyway. I’ve got to keep moving.

There are some things I just can’t let catch up with me.

A friend for a cold night.

Tags

bleeding hearts, cat, cats, Poetry

It’s midnight,
The air is below freezing,
The earth,
Further still, and damp,
Like the heavy wind,
That gets through the cracks in these stone walls.

The neighbors left the cat out again,
The cat is my friend.
We met when he was just a few months old.
He ate bits of leftover chicken from my hands.

He waited for me in the garden,
And without saying anything I knew,
He didn’t have a place to sleep tonight.

So I snuck him passed my sleeping uncle,
Locked him into my room,
Called my grandparents on the phone to give a rather improper goodnight,
And returned without brushing my teeth,
To keep us from freezing this night.

Will I sleep again?

Tags

adolescence, guilt, memory, psychology, social anxiety

As I get older (and I’m not very old), I find myself looking back to understand my past.

To understand why I was struck petrified those moments the teacher said, “Alright, now choose a partner.”

Or how I quit softball after one season, even though I was quite good at it, because social functions surrounding the team sport mortified me.

In third grade, I was put in a special program to help me socialize. At the end of the year, all the children were asked to give a presentation on a project they had been working on. I said no. No amount of bribery could convince me to change my mind.

This fear confused me because in other areas, although I was still quite nervous, I did not shy away from the spotlight. I was chosen a few times for solos in school choir concerts, and had a leading role once in a school play (sometime before my memory began serving me).

From what I can remember, I would be a wreck with nerves, but I would still do these things. My confidence seemed situational. I could sing a few lines in an auditorium of strangers, but couldn’t make simple conversation with a classmate.

This persisted in high school and even through college to a lesser extant. It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I felt bold enough to just talk to the people sitting next to me–and even then there were exceptions. There are still exceptions. I’m still working on it.

But I’m not as paralyzed as I was before. Looking back, I find it hard to imagine what was going through my mind in those moments. Some things I’ve done, all those years ago–out of an eagerness to please, or from a desperate lack of self-worth–still make me cringe. Knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wish I could guide my naive self through the not-so-treacherous-as-it-seems social waters.

Of course I can’t, but knowing that doesn’t help me to address my current struggle with social awkwardness and avoidance of demoralizing faux pas–and my seemingly inescapable desire for validation from others.

It might be useful that in the past–especially between years 13 and 17–I kept quite a detailed record of my feelings in the form of a journal on the blog site Xanga. Unfortunately, Xanga just switched to a new interface, and though all my entries are “archived” they will not be in a readable form until I upload them onto another blog site. My recent attempts to do so have failed, and if I cannot sort the problem out, I will likely have to pay the site to convert them to the new Xanga website before I can get copies of them.

My question is whether or not examining these first-person accounts of my past will actually be useful, or if they will resurface incidents that my mind has purposefully obscured.

I often wrote in those old entries that my purpose in writing was to avoid lying to myself. If I wrote the truth as I understood it in the moment, then I could not deny it to myself in the future. It was an exercise in mental cohesion. It was an experiment with my own psychology.

Towards the end of high school, the guilt of some of the things I was doing kept me from writing, until college when I barely wrote in my journal at all. In some cases I was non-committally dating multiple people at once. In other cases I was blowing off friends and family. Most of the time I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was–my loyalties always seems to conflict.

Part of it was that by leaving a written record, I feared I would be caught in a lie. But the real aversion to writing meant not being able to lie to myself.

There are things of course that I haven’t been able to forget. This, I tell myself, I likely for the best. Mistakes you remember are ones you’re less likely to repeat.

But the memory of some things I’ve said and done still keep me up at night. If I open up that Pandora’s box–and go searching deeper into my past–I wonder, will I ever sleep again?

The children in our backyard are suffering, quietly.

Tags

children, class warfare, community service, education, New York Times, nonfiction, poverty, public housing, shelters

If you read anything today, make it this:

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=2

This is just the second chapter of “Invisible Children,” but it will definitely make you reevaluate your life and what you have going for you.

And maybe, if you’re like me, it will change how you see your responsibility to the future. Maybe it will leave you asking, “What can I do to make this girl’s life better?”

We like to think of bad things happening in “other places in the world.” But as this insightful article reminds us, sometimes those individuals suffering from abject poverty are only as far as the next block.

Certainly we can make some small changes in our lives to help them, our literal neighbors.

I’m not a poet.

Tags

poems, Poetry, poets, writing, writing 2013

I’m not a poet,
And I don’t often read poetry,
And I don’t date men who call themselves poets,
Or read poetry to dimly lit bars,
Or sit by themselves on the grass in a park,
With a moleskin notebook on their lap,
While their eyes stare off in the distance,
Under the brim of a feathered fedora.

I don’t particularly like reading
Or writing poetry.
But every once in a while,
I’ll have something to say
That requires a certain rhythm
That even my abuse of the em dash
Can’t quite convey.
A kind of rambling meaninglessness
That doesn’t quite deserve a paragraph.
And message as arbitrary, as simplistic, and as likely untrue,
A dislike for poets,
That only seems appropriately expressed,
In a poem.

That was an excerpt from “horribly self-indulgent and judgmental things I’ve written (or thought about writing) while bored.”

The thought of hating poets occurred to me while looking over the green at a young man I assumed was a poet. The irony was that I also had a notebook in my own lap. It’s altogether possible he was having the same loatheful thoughts about me.

Also, how do you spell loatheful?

What do you do when you realize you’re wrong in an argument?

Tags

conservatives, democrats, elections, liberals, politics, republicans, tax reform, taxes

I almost went to bed without writing. The truth is I was caught up in a discussion over taxes with someone from my home town. He’s mostly a welfare-bashing neoconservative, but I don’t fault him for his opinions.

The reason I’m writing is because I realized at some point in the argument I had said something that wasn’t 100% true:

“You can’t really trust the government for anything haha. But if its taxes you’re worried about…the fact that more US taxes come from the Payroll tax (tax on hourly wage) not the Income tax (tax for people on salary). So most working class people when they vote against increasing the Income tax don’t realize that it doesn’t actually effect them because they don’t have fixed salaries. But the media tends to gloss over that fact because Democrat or Republican, those politicians are rich and for the most part don’t want working class people to realize they’re getting screwed.”

Reading this over, I had the feeling that this was too simplistic, and perhaps I didn’t really understand the difference between payroll and income tax myself. I did some research into the subject, but all the articles I could find were 5 years old–dating back to when this was a hot button electoral issue in 2008. They were outdated–giving some bits of information here and there I know now to be untrue. And I know that some time in the more recently past, I saw an info-gram that me to believe the assumption I put forth in my original comment. Yet in all my searching, I could find nothing close to corroborating what I had proposed–that indeed the government was preying upon working class people on payroll.

I had the sense that I was saying something that I wasn’t completely sure of, and when I tried to find supporting evidence for it, I couldn’t. I don’t really know how much of what I originally said is wrong. But I feel like I need to find out. It feels very important.

I haven’t had a response back yet from the person I’ve been discussing with. Perhaps he will realize my error and correct me. But until then, I invite anyone on the interwebs to weigh in.

Existential Crisis

Tags

ego, life, mistakes, Photography, pride, travel

Right before bed is not the best time to have an existential crisis. Or is it the only time to have an existential crisis?

Earlier today, I was in the old souk in the town of Jbeil with my aunt. I wanted to take pictures of the souk in Tripoli, but the narrow passageways, however beautiful and sometimes enchanting, bring one very close to people who don’t always regard you with the most pleasant looks. And from what little Arabic I understand, I can tell that they’re not saying the nicest things about us as we pass. It’s not a place I feel comfortable pointing my camera at strangers.

So as a compromise, I intended to take pictures of the less crowded, less impressive souk in Jbeil, while also getting some last minute Christmas shopping out of the way.

I lifted the camera to my face, and pressed down to snap the first picture. But no familiar click of the shutter. I checked to make sure it was on–it was–and if the battery was low–it wasn’t. Then I saw it–a flashing memo on the screen. NO MEMORY CARD INSERTED.

It all flashed back to me in an instant. A few nights earlier, after a trip to some ancient ruins with my uncle, we went into Tripoli to see a movie. It’s not usually a place I feel safe bringing my camera, especially not at night, but we didn’t have time to drop our stuff off at home before the movie. Just incase the camera was stolen, I popped out the memory card and put it in my pants pocket.

The same pants that I saw hanging on the clothesline just before I left the house that morning for Jbeil. I realized then that I had sent all 2000+ pictures I’d taken over the past 3 months through the wash.

Even though I had a back-up SD card in my purse, I was in no mood for pictures. I didn’t even want to shop, and probably hurt my aunt’s feelings with the speed at which I rushed through all our shopping, then insisted I go straight home.

I haven’t tried the card yet. All my Internet research has suggested that my photographs will be just fine as long as I let the card thoroughly dry before trying it in the camera. After realizing that, I’ve relaxed a bit.

But on the ride home with my aunt–silent through almost be entire half hour drive–I realized something rather unpleasant about myself. The real reason I was upset. The incident hurt my pride.

Sure I will be upsetting if I lose all those pictures. But I realize I would have been much less upset if I had lost the pictures had someone mugged me for my camera. At least then it wouldn’t have been because of my own carelessness. I wouldn’t have to tell people, over and over, that the reason I don’t have a single picture from my 3 month stay is because of my own stupidity.

What I didn’t like was having to come to terms with the fact that I’m the kind of person that makes mistakes like this. In other words–I don’t like being reminded that I’m human.

Realizing this, I also realized that come tomorrow, if it turns out my photographs were not destroyed, than it will be easy to completely forget about this revelation of mine–that everyone makes mistakes, and I am no exception. So I decided I simply had to write about it, in case my wishes are realized and I still have all those photos. I need this to be a lesson I won’t forget.

An accident

Tags

animals, cat, cats, friendship, journal

Today’s post I accidentally posted on my other blog, spartaquette. It’s about the cat I’m having a sleep over with tonight. I’m only writing this as a reminder to myself that I haven’t broken my promise to write everyday.

It’s not terribly interesting, but if you’d like to read it, you can find it here.