speaking of milestones

Let's take a look at things I've accomplished this year:

THE GOOD

-Survived grad school
-Partied it up with excellent friends
-Went to Iceland and didn't die
-Learned how to cook and bake


THE UGLY (because there just ain't no middleground between good and ugly in my life)

-Broke my collar bone
-Destroyed my laptop after spilling juice on it
-Fell into my friend's dishwasher
-Cut myself by falling onto a bottle of Jack (...yes)
-Failed my driver's (written) test twice
-accidentally made off with a pair of bowling shoes


Clearly, I am a champion.

LOST

Unlike Madama Roommate, I started watching LOST in 2007, when I was a mere twenty years old. If you know me, you'll know that I don't watch much television. My mother, an epic TV-watcher, would always walk by as I'd be firmly planted on a couch with a book in my lap and try to get me to watch the boobtube, but I preferred reading, thank you very much. When I was home during the summer of '07, my sister found a brief respite from running after her two sons by watching the LOST DVDs that her brother-in-law gave her as a present. After nagging persistently, she managed to convince me to just watch the pilot.

I was hooked right away. The two-hour pilot has, to this day, remained the finest piece of work on television that I've had the pleasure of viewing. I've never forgotten the way in which the camera shared Jack's experience of waking up in the bamboo field and getting up to slowly, horrifyingly discover that a burning plane wreck has emerged around him. I loved the flashback system, where we got to piece together the former lives of these strangers as they began anew on a desert island. This was what absolutely made the first season a masterpiece - that this mysterious island with smoke monsters and polar bears didn't take centrestage just yet. LOST built itself upon the miraculous ways in which the characters' lives - past and present - revealed themselves in poignant, hilarious and, miraculously, interweaving threads.

I'm sad that this show is coming to an end after a devoted 3-year viewership, but I'm excited to see how the writers wrap everything up.

And yes, non-LOSTies, we did end up discovering why there were polar bears on the island - they were brought there for experimentation by the DHARMA initiative. What were the DHARMA initiative doing on the island? Err... beyond electromagnetic experimentation, I'm not sure I really know... with LOST, I don't think you ever really know what's going on. For me, that's part of the glory.

LOST

2010 is, for me, a year of milestones. i'll be finishing my masters. beginning a real-person job. i signed my first lease. i contributed to my first conference. and, most importantly, after 11:30 pm today, i will have watched 121 episodes of what has become an entertainment staple in my life. at some point in early january after having a little bit to drink, M.W. convinced me to sit down at watch the pilot to what would become my favorite series. i remember being pretty unimpressed with the first couple episodes. the characters seemed like predictable "types," the writing didn't seem particularly impressive and i almost convinced myself that the whole "stranded on an island" plot just wasn't for me. luckily, the LOST's masterful cliffhanger endings kept me coming back for more. i'm not sure at exactly what point i become hooked. was it when locke gave the creepy smile with an orange in his mouth? was it when a polar bear emerged from the tropical forest? maybe it was when sawyer first took his shirt off... in any case, one thing led to another, and i ended up watching 5 seasons of LOST over the course of this past winter quarter. some might argue that i've wasted my time. i'd like to argue that LOST represents an incredible feet in contemporary story telling, and for better or for worse, it has captivated me to the point that i'd seriously consider finding a way to incorporate it into a dissertation.
tonight is the night it comes to an end. the series finale premiers tonight at 9pm. the nerd in me wants to take notes on my fellow-LOST addict's responses to particular plot points in the show. i want to have photographic evidence of audience facial expressions. i want to remember the commercials that come between specific points in the show, because 20 years from now when i am a professor at bumbletub university, i want to have the very best materials for my students so that they understand what entertainment means for us millenials.

(to be continued)

coffee table murmurs

by: nadeen kharputly, patrick leahy and ellen truxaw




porous fish nets
piled on the gelatinous remains of
carefully thumbed scales,

the ocean's gossip, tainted rime raves
between sunken sepulchres:
cathedrals of coral arise yawning
away citizens of old from their
crevices.

the electro-kraken roared
their syphillitic gasps
"release the kraken!"
said the amputated
judges as lobsters
ransacked the homes.

aluetians whispers traversed
empty vessels of
piratical rum, streaks on dismembered
tentacles awash with despondence.

+++

japanese cinnamon corks
pop. released and resplendent,
they sliced my lips across
knife-edges, adamantine vapors
distilled into visions of
mermen washed
ashore, stripped in a time before
the oceans blew.

+++

chickory blossoms -- cerulean winks
in dashboards fickle and furtive awash
with bile: my
childhood rends fresh
currents in perrenial
fear. fear grips my gall-bladder blues
like you. wait. what? faces splinter
into buttons bitten -- AAAUUUGGH!

and snakes ascend.

becoming my mother

when i was little, there were two things that could invariably make me fall asleep: long drives and eaves dropping. nestled against my mom's side, i so often fell asleep to the sound of her voice as she talked on the phone with her mother. i don't remember exactly what they talked about, but (rather egocentrically) i assume it had something to do with me, my dad or my brother. i became so accustomed to the daily conversations between mom and grandma that i began to see their identities as inseparable. i knew my grandma was my mommy's mommy. i saw their mother-daughter bond as one which included me, and from a very early age i recognized the fact that at one point my mother was a child like me (and that she never really stopped needing her mother, and so neither would i).

growing up i often took for granted the omnipresence of my grandma in my life. i must have seen her at least once a week for most of my childhood, and when i didn't see her i felt her presence in the mannerisms she passed on to my mother or in the mumble of her voice through the phone. even during her last few years, when she lived in the room adjoining to mine, i saw my grandma and my mother as so tightly bonded that i knew that anything i said to one of them would be known by the other. anything that one said to me, the other would undoubtedly agree upon.

it was only after my freshman year of college that i really began to feel a widening divide between the personalities of the 'mothers' in my life. it started with a phone call. i was walking through the quad on a breezy, slightly chilly afternoon in early june. studying substitution reactions for my o-chem final, i occasionally looked up at the bright tiled roofs, the voluptuous arch of the palms and the plumes of jacarandas dancing in eddies above the sun-bathed pavement. basking in an aesthetic paradise, organic chemistry was rather low on my list of priorities, so put down my chem notes, and picked up my course-reader for my first poetry class "literature into life," and read a poem that has lived beneath my skin for four years now:

jacaranda

Because the branches hang down with blossoms
for only a few weeks, lavender clumps
that let go quickly
and drop to the ground,

because the flowers are so delicate
even their motion through the air
bruises them,
and they lie where they fall
like tiny pouches of shriveled skin,

because our lives are sagging with marvels
ready to fail us,
clusters of faces drifting away,

what's settled for is not nearly
what we are after, claims
we keep making or are made on us.
But the recurrence of change
can still surprise us, lilac
that darts and flickers
like the iridescent head of a fly,
and the tree making us
look again.

-shirley kaufman

in a twist of fate that still clenches my stomach with a grasp that whispers, "there's no such thing as coincidence," my phone rang. i answered to hear my mother's voice, "grammie's in the hospital." to me, the perfect beauty of that june day became an embodiment of wallace stevens' aphorism, "death is the mother of beauty." that day marked the beginning of a blurry summer and a new relationship with my mother.

my mom and i had always been close, but during that summer that we held our breath together. we wiped my grandma's dying body with sponges, slept on the floors of hospitals and squeezed desperate 'i love you's' into the palms of tired hands.

it was during that summer that i saw that my mother was weak, so human some day i might lose her too. my aunts and uncles like to tease that my mom is the 'cheerleader' of the family (just for the record, she was never actually a cheerleader). she is the sweetest, warmest, most supportive person any of you will ever meet. i kid you not. my mother never had a cruel intention as long as she's lived. when faced with her mother's own imminent death, she only became kinder. she and i brought my grandma all kinds of foods (including the frequent pies that my grandma always asked for but could never eat), we sat by her bedside almost everyday; and for the first time in my life, i saw my loquacious, social butterfly of a mother sit silent for hours.

my brother and i agree that our mom is a genius. where my dad excels with books, my mom has the ability to read people with an uncanny accuracy. not only can my mother tell me exactly who my brother or i will date/who likes us months before we even realize they exist, but she can discern a hundred different nuances about anyone's situation just from the way he says 'hello.' this skill made my mother the most attentive of caretakers, but it also grieved her immensely as she understood the profound pain my grandma endured during her final months.

during one of my grandma's last days, i watched her struggle for air, gasping "help me, ellie, help." i was alone in the room with her and held her hand, knowing that i could offer her no consolation. in an almost cinematic moment, after catching her breath, with her eyes closed my grandma said, "take care of your mom." my grandma died in the early morning before i had to drive back up for my sophomore year of college. i didn't eat or sleep for days and i didn't know what to say to my mom, but time passed. my mom and i talked about inane everyday life and slowly but surely our daily conversations fortified the mother-daughter bond my grandma cherished so much.

i know i am a pretty shitty daughter a lot of the time. i pretty much never answer my phone. i make fun of the ditsy and often bizarre things my mom says and does (usually in front of her face). i get frustrated with her incessant worries and nagging remarks about my health. but when it comes down to it, i am extension of my mother. sure, we are pretty different people, but she knows me better than anyone and she loves me better than anyone ever will. if some day i can love other people the way she does, if i can have a daughter (or son) who loves me the way i love her, i'll know i've succeeded. i just hope that the tight-bond i inherited is one that transcends generations and stays strong longer than i live.

single mothers, and why they're awesome

I never thought consciously about the fact that I was raised by a single mother until recently. Mainstream conceptions of single motherhood tend to encompass girls and women who have children out of wedlock, (stereo)typically in the absence of a partner. I hadn't distinguished these women from those who lose their partners from death, divorce or various forms of leave-taking or abandonment. I guess I found myself under the same line of thought until I've started to become aware of recent conversations where I tell people that I only started speaking Arabic "when my dad left."

The story is that my parents, who are both Arab but of different nationalities, could never agree on which dialect of Arabic they would teach me. Eventually they put their arguments for or against the Kuwaiti or Jordanian dialect aside and decided that they would teach me English, instead. Once my parents got divorced, though, my mother and I began to speak in Kuwaiti rather than English at home.

Anyway, after telling various iterations of this story with the phrase "when my dad left" instead of "when they divorced," I got to thinking that, in my case at least, "divorcing" and "leaving the family" are pretty much the same thing. A notable exception lies with my maternal aunt, who divorced her husband but nevertheless maintained a great friendship with him until his death, even having him move back into her house when he fell ill. But the point is that until recently, I never grouped "divorce" and "abandonment" under the same category, where I'm convinced they both belong.

So I was raised by a divorced, abandoned, and single mother, starting from when I was around eight. I grew up in a household of entirely women: my mother, sister and I. Although in the distant past I sort of lived in the same house with my dad and, post-divorce, sometimes saw him on a bi-monthly basis, I don't really remember what it's like to be raised by a father. My childhood and adolescent experiences and education were foreseen exclusively by my mother. From the very first day of my education up to the very last, my mother drove me to from school, even while she maintained a full-time job so that she could support our family and pay for my schooling.

My sister, who is actually my half-sister, was also raised (minus her early adolescent years) by my mother, who divorced her first husband (not my father) when my sister was still a baby. My mother never went to university, even though she was given a full scholarship to study in the US, because she was raising my sister, who was still very young at the time. My mother basically went through two phases of single motherhood.

I will never respect and idolise anyone more than I do my mother, because in my eyes she gave up every semblance of herself in order to give me and my sister a life. When I think of my mom and her extended life as a single mother, I'm outraged by societal lashes against the role of (typically younger) single mothers in society. Putting aside the arguments against the "irresponsibilities" of teenage pregnancies, I know that most people can accept that it takes some fucking guts to to raise a kid on your own.

It also infuriates me when people try to mitigate the difficulties of being a single mother by arguing for the absolute necessity of close-knit, nuclear, socially and religiously sanctioned families. Being married to a man is not going to make a family any better if the husband is absent, irresponsible, or worse, violent. Maternal support can come from immediate and extended family, friends, communities and government support. Though most of us were brought up thinking that a child will generally be raised by a man and a woman, all that really matters is that the child is surrounded by love and adequate material support.

I had a loving mother who provided for me in every possible way, and I can't have asked for more.

Happy Mother's Day.

My best friend

Insomnia and I, we've been bosom buddies since the tender age of seven. Tied to the hip virtually ever since then, except for a brief respite last fall, when a minor case of anemia left me so exhausted that I would begin to feel sleepy by midnight. This development scared me so much (seriously, midnight? that's when I usually start making round two of dinner) that I went straight to Vaden. I didn't care much about the composition of my blood; the fact that I was falling asleep at normal hours pretty much ruptured the fundamental standards of my identity.

I'm kind of proud to be an insomniac. I still crow about the glory days of my freshman year, winter quarter, when I got roughly two hours of sleep every night during the weekday. Things took a few precarious turns when I blacked out in class a couple of times (only to wake up and have no clue where the fuck I was, to the amusement of my classmates), or when I crawled into bed one night and fell into unconsciousness so rapidly that the fire alarm that went off ten minutes thereafter failed to wake me up. Needless to say, I built up a reputation for being insane averse to sleep very quickly. When this changed at the beginning of this year, I felt the foundations of my being crumbling.

Then again, reverting back to insomnia was no fun. I seemed to have lost the ability to thrive on two hours of sleep and still get a lot out of my classes and readings. I missed being able to sleep like a normal person, so I stopped taking my iron pills in the hope that my exhaustion would come back, allowing me to frolic with my sweet, sweet sleep once more.

Looking at the time stamp on this post, you'll notice that this sure as hell ain't the case right now.

on disasterous first dates

I always reuse the same piece of advice when friends are nervous about going on first dates, or lamenting dates gone wrong:

"At least he speaks English, y'all."

No, really. I have recently (sort of) beheld the perils of dating a non-English (or a non-whatever your native language is) speaker, and let me tell you: it is a pretty damn good way of making you FEARLESS when it comes to dating people you can actually communicate with.

You think it's fun at the beginning, when you're basking in the novelty of communicating via simple words, charades and/or hand gestures. Sometimes, conversations will consist entirely of listing various items, which is great for language practice, not gonna lie. But try talking about your feelings or the future of your relationship and you might as well be discussing cracked up scientific investigations into the apocalypse, 'cuz that's where y'alls relationship'll be headin'. It's important to be able to communicate certain baselines, like whether your partner is being a) a douche b) crazy or c) inappropriate (what I wish I'd known how to say last summer: "no you may NOT take me to a motel on our first date... or EVER you miserable piece of shit.")

I was gonna save this story for another post, but looks like it'll have to go here. So I was in Korea last summer. I went to an Electronics market to buy an external hard drive. I didn't know that the market in question was the biggest in Asia. I was overwhelmed and spent 3 hours trying to get the best deal. The guy I ended up buying my drive from sold me the thing and then proceeded to ask me out on a date. Now in Korean, there's a linguistic construct that you use to politely turn someone down. I had learned this in first year Korean, but given that I was a) exhausted b) crazy) and c) totally out of my element, I forgot about all of this and just said yes because I didn't actually know how to say no.

Life lesson #283742872: learn how to say no when you're learning a foreign language.

We met up the next day to get coffee. I didn't realise that the guy was 30 years old, because a) I hadn't asked him b) he's Korean and thus looked like he was 12. He assumed that I was older than 22 because I told him that I was in grad school and probably because I actually do look like I'm thirty thanks to all my sleepless nights at Stanford.

Our conversation was halfway pleasant. We talked about simple concepts because that was all I could manage at the time. Things started going downhill when he started making physical motions to indicate that he was "uncomfortable." I tried to communicate that I was quite happy sitting in Starbuck's cold hard chairs, thank you very much, but he insisted on leaving. He said that he had this hobby where he took pictures of buildings' facades, and as part of this cracked-up hobby he wanted to check out this motel and take a picture of its exterior, so why not check it out together?

RED LIGHT RED LIGHT RED LIGHT RED LIGHT RED LIGHT

Being the brilliant young lady that I am, I figured that I might as well accompany this chap just to make sure that he finds the building. His experience in the military didn't seem to serve him much purpose as his sense of direction was quite horrendous. You know you're a worthless navigator when you rely on me to help you out, brother. Anyway, I walked him over to the building, where he started taking lopsided pictures with his camera phone (I remember distinctly thinking, legitimate hobby fail!) and thought I'd ditch him right then and there and escape with my self unscathed until he suggested that we go inside to "watch a movie."

RED ALERT RED ALERT RED ALERT RED ALERT RED ALERT

Had my Korean been any good at the time, I would've employed any of the following sentences before high-tailing it out of there:

"This is completely inappropriate, you motherfucker"
"How dare you! What kind of lady do you think I am!"
"I am not interested in sleeping with you; I can barely pronounce your first name and I think you are a fucking sleazeball"

Not being able to pull any of these out of my ass, I relied on the art of alternative expression and just told him that I liked women. Complete bullshit, but hey - a girl's gotta work with what she got, yo.

Flabbergasted, he was like, "women?"
Shrugging, I told him that I had mentioned that I was from San Francisco.
He nodded and paused. Then he started slapping his chest while exclaiming "I am woman!" repeatedly. It was the only time he'd used English.
At that point I just walked away because I just couldn't deal. Luckily he didn't follow me home and assault my lying, lesbian-parading self.

So, ladies and gentlemen, take heart when approaching first dates, because chances are that your date is an English speaker. If not, I would consider learning how to say "Ask me to enter that motel one more time and I'mma tase you, bro" beforehand.

on creepsters, part 1 of many

For some reason or another, I've had a lot of creepers come my way.

//side-track: I checked to see if there's a notable a difference between 'creeper' and 'creepster.' They're synonymous in both Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia, but the latter provides a list of hilarious disambiguations, including:

- Various vines, particularly to species in the genus Parthenocissus

- Creeper (clothing for infants), a one-piece article of clothing worn by an infant, usually with snap openings in the crotch to facilitate the changing of diapers (I'm never calling it a onesie again)

- A type of shoe known as Brothel creeper (if there's any shoe that just screams PIMP!, it's the brothel creeper)

and finally, right on target:

- A person who lurks around corners and hangs out where they are not wanted.

Anyway. Creepers and creepsters. I encounter many of them for reasons that escape me. You'd think people of all sorts of persuasions, dubious or not, would avoid contact with a shifty-looking Arab lady (I may be shifty, but I'm still a lady! ...bitches.), but no. They just keep on coming. Luckily, they always bring ample opportunity for hilarity, so I'm not one to complain here.

Last year, when I was still an innocent young lass looking for housing in Seoul, I happened to think that it would be a productive endeavour if I searched on the Korean version of craigslist. If you're nowhere near as naive as I was back then, your thought process would look something like this:

Craigslist + Korean = FOREIGN CREEPSTERS GALORE.

Alas, I was young and idealistic so I gave the website a chance (not even having any experience of the local craiglist) and stumbled upon a charming little apartment that was up for summer rent. I e-mailed the poster and received a speedy reply which began like this:

"Hello ...very beautiful name

Where does your name come from ,it sound indian or arabic?"

The guy, who's French, goes on to talk about himself, his Chinese wife and their adorable little mixed race babies, who are "athmatic" and very sensitive to cigarette smoke. In addition to standard questions (do you smoke, how do you plan on paying), he asks me about my "caracter," "relation" and "family" in order to determine whether I'm some sort of pot-smoking hussy who plans on having nightly slumber parties with the locals. Fair enough, I suppose.

I love the opening of his e-mail. Many of our blog's readers will recognise the ongoing joke that everyone and their mother seem to think that I'm Indian, for some reason or another (read: my nose piercing). I'll never be able to escape this assumption, even when it's an Internet encounter where my face isn't being shown.

That was an example of a minor creeper. Maybe one day I'll tell you the story of the time I went on a date with a thirty year old who didn't speak English. Man, I miss Korea.