oh dear.

of all the things i should be doing right now,

this is really, really, really not one of them. 

2 papers due tomorrow, on ataturk's impact on fictional poets' brains, and the dilemma facing fictional palestinian and israeli lovers. also midterm tomorrow on a lot of history i havent read. and i havent slept since yesterday morning because i had a paper due today.

this situation is clearly not optimal. can i just drop all my classes and forget about it? i am tired.

that is all. this is the worst blog ever. i promise i will make it up to you soon, blog. and i am sorry for wasting your little html machine's time by making it type and format and post all this. i will buy you a popsicle tomorrow, a computer-safe grape popsicle and you will love it. :)

grape popsicles for my computer? oh dear.

timetravel to the present!

but, it turns out, she did have more to say.

always, always, always more to say.

here we are in california, after the long blogdrought that has plagued my particular blog. and things are... strange.

i am a strange person. this is a strange life. that was true before i ever left anywhere to go anywhere, but its like 9384759384597 more times true now. i have made a list of things that are weird about america and living in it:

1. i call it "america" now. or "the states", sometimes. but mostly america. which i would never have done before i left because (obvi) there are several americas that dont include the US. but now i do. and people think it's weird. at least i've stopped saying "amriika". oh, arabic.

2. i still click at people, but i've modified it to be less offensive.  can we please note, for the record, that i modified something to be less offensive? thank you.

3. everyone speaks english here. it's exhausting. the silence that comes with the noise of everyone speaking in a language you have to concentrate to understand is overwhelming, but glorious. realizing that if you are within proximity you will be forced to  not only hear the 15 year old girls in line at blockbuster behind you talk about how mad they are at their mothers, but understand them, is anything but glorious. claustrophobic, really.

4. i am occasionally still scandalized by things that are not scandalous? like girls with wet hair, or very short shorts. or alcohol. however, generally, i am less scandalized than ever before. i have theories about this, to be continued.

5. no one honks. at anyone. ever. even if they're about to run you over, they won't honk at you. i mean, can't we find a happy medium here?

6. the other day, i was walking on a sidewalk in a tank top and i was so excited to talk to sarah that i did a dance. wait what?

i could put like 10000000 things on this list, but it would be pointless. how do i explain that, no matter where i go or how much i'm willing to pay for it, i can't get anything even remotely jordanian?

american sheesha? not the same. also ridiculously expensive.

juice made of fruit? good luck. 

turkish coffee? what is that? 

hummus? please. nice try, trader joe's.

arak? ok i don't miss arak. but i couldn't find it if i wanted.

my idiotic, but lovable, jordanian phone, doesn't even turn on.

my jordanpants are too ripped up to wear, and i can't get them fixed because i refuse to wash them.

american chili powder is NOT the same.

zaatar? supposedly thyme? try again.

american olive oil? gross.

i can't make jordanian ramen because american ramen is such a sodium attack.

i mean, come on, i can't even get a pepsi with sugar in it in this country. what is that?

and these things sound really, really petty and stupid, i'm aware, but they matter. they matter because there's no such thing as a "piece of home," it's not like in paris when we were craving america so we would go to mcdonalds and starbucks and giggle at how guilty we felt about it. there is no jordanian mcdonalds here, there's no ANYTHING here. i'm really going cold turkey. and i don't like it.

it's just so... comfortable. too comfortable. and not in a ridiculous, guilty-paranoid-ascetic way; what i mean is that i walk around on sidewalks, and spend $4 on coffee, and wear what i want, and say what i want (mostly), and i don't have to blowdry my hair, and i can go to the beach, and i go to classes where everything is in english, and the weather is great, and i have a nice american phone with a keyboard the size of my face, and i can use a debit card, and i can get coffee TO GO, and if i want i can get notebooks that open on the left and aren't only graph paper, and there are places where i don't have to smell cigarettes if i don't want to, and i can buy alcohol without the necessity of being a stealthninja about it, and i look like everyone else, and i talk like everyone else, and i don't have to stand out if i don't feel like it. and i go to class and learn about "abstract" things like the differences between islamic and christian views of divine unity and human rights in palestine and syrian politics and the social position of bedouin women, and i realize that

this is not real life.

this is nowhere near real life. this is a giant waiting room; i don't know what i'm waiting for, but i feel like i'm just waiting for something to happen, or for somewhere to go, or something to do. life here feels like pretend, like we're just playing dollhousebeachtown until it's time to go outside and rejoin the real world.

and i'm not trying to make a point, and i'm not trying to be offensive; this is just how i feel. the feeling is like... it's as if you were abducted by aliens when you were 15. and they brought you to their alien planet and it was hard at first but you assimilated and you lived your whole life there; you married an alien and had alien kids and you became a famous author on alienplanet who wrote true stories, and then all of a sudden one day you blinked and you were back in high school, with your now 52-year-old brain and understanding and experience and viewpoint. and you remembered everything: your kids and your books and your favorite place to watch the second moon rise, but who are you going to tell? who would want to hear about it, and if they did, who would understand? so you go back to your high school life, trying to forget everything and live like a normal kid. 

trouble is, now you know. and once you know, you can't forget. once you figure out that (spoiler alert) santa isn't real, you can't go back to believing. and do you see how your high school life, your high school problems and high school dreams would feel like a waiting room, so unreal they must be temporary. you'd just wait out your high school years, trying to figure out a way back to your real life. and you'd think: you changed so much, things must have changed while you were away. something, something, something must have changed.

something must have changed.

right?

i love it here, i do, all i'm saying is it's weird. california is my latest foriegnexchange experience. how am i supposed to make sense of that?

untitled. on purpose.

note: this was written on the plane(s), from amman to london and then from london to san francisco. you can tell because i get crazy on planes. also, the 77-80 pages referred to are contained in "the confidential word document", which is the secret, uncensored version of all of this. i began writing that on the plane flight home from paris, which explains all the full-circle talk i do throughout ("77 pages later" refers to 77 pages after i started, after i flew back from paris). at the time i wrote this, i hadn't integrated all the necessary entries into the document, so it appeared to be 80 pages long. as of now, with almost all entries compiled, it is 102.5 pages.

love. :)



the day of the plane. sometime may 22 or 23rd, we got lost in between the 2.

11:20ish



77 pages later, she flew home again. 77 pages later, she wrote again from a plane again, going west and chasing the sun again.

i don’t know where im going. i dont know where i am. all i’ve got is laurence juber’s guitar, stand by me.


i left again. i left people i love, and places ill never get back, and nowhere near enough love letters to make it all ok. and when we got to the airport this morning, my sweetest-roommate-in-the-world, who is a sunflower in my heart, cried. and, i mean when i left paris i bawled. so i really thought i would cry.

and i didnt. not once. not this time.

i wonder why. i don’t know why. i mean, this is the last day of my life, the first day of my life, this day of my life. but i didn’t cry, i couldn’t and i don’t know if i will. i’ve just... come to terms i think. i’m really, really ready. and i’ve already got my head around the idea of having people i love for the rest of my life and only see a few times a year if that. im not worried about my friends- i’ll miss them, but they’re family. i’m not afraid of losing them. and i think, since i’ve already come to terms with that idea, and i’ve come to terms with the idea of leaving jordan, of leaving the world and going back to california for a while, this isn’t the tearing that leaving paris was. that was the first time, before i’d ever promised anyone in north carolina that i would come visit them. those were the days i didnt know how to live without anyone; and now, we’ve lived a bit and we can do it. paris was a tearing, a scab ripped off too soon. this, this is TIME. this is RIGHT. it feels like a life cycle, like watching a flower live and die. sinking in music, i am sinking in it. fading into it. fading away- am i disconnecting? am i distancing myself? i don’t know. i’m just letting it happen as it does.


who knows, we know, what is natural? what is broken, what is fixed? we are so high up now, there are no words that can catch us. there are no strings that can tie us. there are no voices that can reach us. we are alone. alone in our height, in our depth, in our solstice rituals. we are a crane unfolding, a flock of geese flying home in our own little V formation.

i dont even know where i am anymore. i dont even know what i am anymore- im so far gone from what i was that i cant even tell ive changed. all i feel is far away.



16:37 amman, jordan time. flight from london to san francisco

and now im stuck on amman time. haha im never gonna get this right. and i feel like will smith and his movie, his heart wrenching breathtaking movie that i have watched silently twice, it feels like that was days ago. weeks ago that i left them all this morning, weeks ago that i thought i would have cried.


77 pages later, and here we are again. flying, again. there should be some sort of metaphor for this and my life, i think. something cool about flying and movement and self-possession and freedom. clearly i have not thought this metaphor through quite all the way. i need to hire someone to do that, a metaphor-elaborator. if i ever have the money to hire someone solely to elaborate on my metaphors. i will have too much money. and if that is ever the case, will someone please smack me upside the head and tell me to do something useful with my life.

it is so sunny up here. i wonder if it’s always sunny in the sky. i wonder how far away from the earth you have to be for it to always be sunny, right before the point where it never gets sunny because now you’re in space. i think i would very much like that place. it would be like santa barbara, where it’s always almost sunset, long shadows all the time.

and i wonder if the earth casts shadows, and where they fall and when. i wonder if there are times when planets cast long shadows like trees in the late afternoon. i wonder where those places are, and i wonder who looks at those shadows.

i wonder who lives in them. i wonder what it feels like to be tiny and never know that you’ve been living in a shadow your whole life. i wonder if maybe everyone lives in a shadow, we just don’t know it. we don’t have any idea how bright the sun really should be.

maybe if we lived out of the shadows it would kill us; too bright, the sun would scald us and disintegrate our bones.

musical notes scrawled on crumpled, yellowed paper. 78 pages later, she starts forgetting where she is, what she’s writing, if in english or arabic or french or cuneiform or musical notes or rorscharch tests. transfiguration, translation, transliteration. i think transliteration is a metaphor for my life, for my poetry. i can only write in these blocky, two-dimensional, colorless lifeless soulless ancient scratches in the ground. i can’t convey even the letters of what i want to say, there is no such sound as LIFE, as SOUND, as FREEDOM in ancient blocky scratch language. there are only those symbols that represent some dead, hamida imitation of them. i am transliterating feelings, breathing moments into a language without even the capacity to pronounce the words. as i told rula, english is a useless language, sometimes. i am a useless writer, sometimes.

alle, allealleluia. and i hope, i hope you are tired out, and i know, i know there is joy now.

i am tired. i am old, these days, i think. i have been twentyone years old for one day, and i’ve no idea what it was ever like to be twenty. we are new people every second, and i every tenth of a second. i think i have a shorter half-life than these people. or maybe a longer one? i don’t really understand how half-lives work or how they would make sense in this context. frankly, i never thought half-lives made sense. thank you, christian school hatred of science classes.

i am many, many feet up in the sky, flying home from jordan and writing about half-lives. 78 pages later, ladies and gentlemen, she has lost her mind.

10:47am california time.

my clocks are all confused now. i’ve no idea if that time is right in ANY time zone, much less the one im traveling to. why is this so hard, why can’t my computer just stay in the time zone and day i put it in? i mean when i turned it on it was some random time in amman but on the 21st. and i was like... wait we went backwards a day? time zone application, you have lost absolutely all credibility.

do you know what’s ridiculous? i even feel like a foreigner now. everywhere i go i’m a foreigner. in dc it’s because i walk around raising my eyebrows amusedly at all the suits who’ve never seen anyone regard them with quite that expression before. in paris it’s because i wear short skirts with boots and ripped jeans and not enough black, and i smile too much. in amman it’s because i’m blonde and i have a funny ayn and a weak ma3salama. and here, on the way to california, i am a foreigner again.

i don’t know how to deal with toilet paper.

i mean i haven’t had to do this is a long time. and in ladies bathrooms there are always little trash cans! just like in amman. so i didnt even have to think about it until i was in the bathroom on the plane, and realized with horror that i had no idea where to put the toilet paper. i kept looking around for a little trash can when i realized oh. people flush that in america. and now i feel sheepish and silly and i feel like an immigrant from some stereotypically "un-modern" place who has no idea how to open a car door. for christ’s sake, i didn’t know what to do with the toilet paper. as if it was some great technological advancement that we dont have “where i come from”.

i’m feeling rather embarrassed. and rather like i just moved to LA from rural... i don't even know where. what what what am i going to do when i have to function like an american again.

i actually really enjoy NOT having everything luxuriously, obnoxiously american all the time. living without them is better. it takes the unnecessaries and the stupidities that go along with them out of my life. individual paper toilet seat covers? come on. what, we dont have wax paper between our asses and our toilet seats? living dangerously, i see. god. and why do we need straws? seriously, ok i understand curly ones are way fun and they’re reusable so i totally approve. but honestly, who needs a disposable straw so they don’t have to put out the effort to lift a cup to their mouth? what is that?

the things i write on planes are always interesting. it’s a little poetic sometimes, and other times just stir crazy (like now) when i’ve realized that i still have 6 hours and 3500 miles to go in this effing 2 feet of space i have, because it tells me on the little screen in the seat in front of me that for some reason our plane is having a really hard time getting past the coast of greenland. so i rant about straws and toilet paper and america and half-lives. sigh. these, these are the days.

maybe they are all “the days”. i kind of think it’s true. after all, when the wind blows in the trees it’s always the ave maria.


every time.


12:08
so this is worth documenting.

i just ordered a vodka tonic on the plane. made it a strong one, too. and i don’t know, maybe it’s that i’ve got these american dollars i’m just itching to use, or maybe it’s because of the whole hey-you’re-21-now-and-you-can, or maybe it’s because i’ve been on this effing plane for half my adult life, but this is gonna be fun.

so here i am, on a plane, wedged in between everyone i think that previously inhabited london and their extended families, playing impossible sudoku and drinking absolut and tonic water. could it be a better day/night/tomorrow morning? i think not.

the worst part is, we’re only 3 sips in and i think im getting a second one.


15:07

dear god i dont think i can make it another 2 hours. im just watching the miles countdown, 968, 842, 804. even numbers. interesting. i like those more now in real life.

79 pages later, she starts talking about her preferences for even vs. odd numbers.

it was years ago that we walked around shmeisani, stumbling over demolished sidewalks because we were too busy looking at the world to care about the ground. years since we climbed onto the train station in the desert, years since we snuck out the stairs of al manar. years since we walked to the tops of syrian mountains, years since flowers in palestine were all i cared about. i am light years and eras and physical, geographical centuries away from everything that i ever planned to do, every exploration i ever undertook. here we are now, in the sky and old, now, older than we ever thought we could be. and everything is so far away.

clouds are winds are melodies are, the sun is what we make of it and the haze is closing in. we are planets, in orbits, orbits of each other. and the sun is god is we are atoms. electrons and whizzing stars and tree age rings age rings. pieces of the universe and palm trees in the sun.

god, palm trees in the sun.

and this is a circle of questions; i don’t know where it ends. maybe there’s another book, maybe just another chapter. maybe just another entry- maybe life goes on tomorrow like i never flew away from everything. maybe i’m gonna cry just one tear, maybe two, right now about the fact that i’m leaving everything. god. i want my friends. i want amman. i want jordan back, i want abdullah, i want garden street and i want a taxi driver to try to cheat me after midnight so i can put his ass where it belongs.



it’s really interesting, the opposite of paris, that i didn’t cry until now, until i’m about to land. and i think it’s because it’s over, becasue my life as i know it, my exploration year, all my plans and everything i wanted and needed and everything i wanted to become has happened, now. and maybe it’s because i lived, because i’m happy now, because i made it. because i’m everything i ever wanted to be, and now i’m going home to prove it. maybe because i took my year on the mountain, because i read my books and wrote my stories and left my flower seeds everywhere i could, and now i’m going back down to the ground and i’m going to... i’m going to be so great. and maybe it’s because i’ve never been proud of anything or anybody the way i’m proud of me right now. maybe it’s because i’m going home, having learned the secret arts and meditations, and now i’m going home to guard the village and prepare to fight the dragons.


all im saying is maybe. maybe this is it, maybe this is life, maybe i’ll never be this high again. maybe i’ll only ever cry when i fly. maybe i’ll never cry again. maybe we’re just atoms, maybe all there is is space. maybe it doesn’t matter.

and 80 pages later, maybe she had nothing more to say.

traveling salesman/ the return

ignore the title; i know far too much about "the office" to be a healthy human being. but, at any rate, i'm back. and so is the blog. excited? should be ;)

we will begin with a few things that were never published, the last post i wrote in jordan (on my very ridiculous 21st birthday, during which i stayed home and drank wine with my lovely friends and sewed up my jordanpants so i could wear them on the plane and not be scandalous. i also spent the day taking jordan pictures, i should post those sometime. they are pretty. anyway, that is the first thing. and the second, which will be posted following this one, is what i wrote on the plane on the way back. so... here goes? cheers.

21 may 2009. 22:24

it is

my last day in jordan. my last night in jordan.

and i am sinking, sinking, sinking in music. drowning in it, even. i see everything in fast forward, feathers on my breath, black flowers blossom. bloom and live and die and leave petals and all of it happens in an instant. wind in the tall grass, whispers in the trees. i don't even know where i am anymore.

everything is beautiful, everything is walking. walking, walking, step by step toward wherever it is we're going. wherever it is im going. ripples in the ground with every step, it can feel me too.if anything could ever be called god, and if anyone could ever say they heard it speak, this would be it. feeling the universe ripple with me while i walk on ground i've never seen before.

it is a transfiguration, if a quiet one. we are what we are, living or dead or more than either. red pills and blue pills mean nothing to me. it is a myth; there is no such choice. things like this are not so optional.

here we are, ground sky i dont know the difference. sinking somewhere, rising into somewhere else. and i am on the side of the pond. she grins, laughs a little, and then dives in and plunges to the bottom until she drowns or comes out the other side.