> tapioca world tour

I found out today that my good friends F. & D. are pregnant — well, F. is pregnant, but D. helped. They came up from NYC to announce that, come New Year’s, Kayen Manovil will be born into a bathtub in Argentina, which is pretty awesome, and unbelievable, and awesome.

This is the part where I go off on a diatribe about how quickly life blows through us, how suddenly there are so many weddings or babies or both, or divorces, or other big announcements. F. and I spent a semester in the Netherlands together in 1999, jumping in leaves in Vienna, clubbing in Barcelona, and taking photobooth pictures of ourselves in every train station in Europe. We were babies then. We wore funny clothes and obsessed over boys and generally had no idea what we were doing. I can’t believe she is reproducing! That’s totally amazing! I can’t believe she’s PREGNANT!!!

Ok, I’m done.

Anarchist kid on the train thinks
everyone should die

but he smelled the flowers on the hill tonight,
felt the orange sky hugging his skinny arms.
Something drives him on.

The city smelled like the sea today.
Night smells like life.
And in strangers’ livingrooms, the walls express
such a clear happiness, it makes me

remember to breathe deep
and walk slow, and not sleep, and recall
with renewed clarity the effect those early
years we shared had on me.

Everywhere I look, someone is loving something.
The grey sea, the green trees
keep us, at the very least, believing.

Now, this thick air, the sound of breaking
mufflers and someone’s rattling keys,
the way the train saunters its dirty way
to a bright platform

makes me realize nothing has changed.
Good comes, and comes again.

A man, a plan, a canal…

It’s hot, but I’ve got a new plan. I’m beginning Phrase One of a 3-month stint researching various options for the Rest of My Life, with the help of one of our directors at the office. I am going to make it or go down in flames. But first we have to clean the kitchen, pay bills.

My office is half-empty, digital songs are on repeat. I contemplated volunteering for the wikimedia conference at Harvard next week, but thought better of it. However, I’ve discovered the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and its awesomeness is enough to make me cry.

These days, most anything is enough to make me cry. But in a good way.

Best part about July: Walking around Castle Island at night with a soft-serve ice cream cone.

Best part about being 28: Spending money on technology, food, and weird clothes. In that order.

Best part about not being pregnant: I have plenty of room to be consistently pennyless and make tons of mistakes while mapping out a major life plan.

Best benefit of my new 30-minute subway commute to and from work: Reading Queen Noor’s autobiography.

Scene: The backyard. My landlord and his male in-laws are standing around, planning out how to cement the patio. Suddenly, a racoon runs by.

“Whoa!” [Lots of dialogue in Creole]

“Makak?” [More discussion in Creole about makaks]

Makak resembles the Portuguese “macaco”, which DD knows from his ample collection of Portuguese pop music. He quickly figured out that our backyard of five men were guessing a monkey had infiltrated the property. And why not? Perhaps this isn’t out of the ordinary on Cape Verde. And really, how many racoons do you ever see in Dorchester?

“Dave,” my landlord said, a little sheepishly, “what is that thing?”

“That’s a racoon,” DD explained. “They have thumbs. They can open up your garbage cans and go through all the trash.”

“Is it ok to get near them?” he asked.

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

The collection of perplexed men then began hucking stones at the tree in which said racoon had hidden. The stones cleared the tree and began landing in neighbor’s driveway, about two inches away from their shiny car.

“I have a BB gun,” our landlord said, after considering the situation. “I’m gonna shoot this thing from the second floor the next time I see him.”

I guess it’s really not as priceless a moment when I write it down, but if you were there, you’d appreciate it. “Why wouldn’t it be a monkey?” we asked ourselves later. “Monkeys get into food and climb through trees and have tails. It makes perfect sense.” I can’t wait to go to Cape Verde.

Reasons to paint your livingroom torquoise:

- It’s fun!
- It improves you biceps
- It makes you feel like you’re in a Mediterranean lounge
- Why not? You’re renting. Who cares?

We should probably buy stock in Home Depot and Mahoney’s plant store, since half our paychecks went there this weekend. The moral of the story is home improvement and budgeted interior design does wonders for uplifting the psyche.

We also bought a ridiculous orchid on sale for 10 dollars! Can you believe that? No, we can’t believe it either.

Meanwhile, our favorite Californian and her mini-Californian continue to thrive, in and out of water. In addition to debating the merits (and demerits) of various Latin American Socialist rebellion leaders, this is a time to remember the little people, people.

baltic blue!

People are fleeing Lebanon, or trying. I think of N., my former coworker, who last year returned to Lebanon with her husband and two little kids because, she thought, the violence was finally over. Now, even if they use their American passports to get out, the queue is over 15,000, and U.S. rescue efforts haven’t even gotten underway. What about the Lebanese without dual citizenship? Where do they go? And what about the Iraqis, too soon forgotten?

From Baghdad Burning:

Why don’t the Americans just go home? They’ve done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they ‘cut and run’, but the fact is that they aren’t doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what’s being done about it? Nothing. It’s convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it’s no longer a ‘life’ like people live abroad. It’s simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends - friends like T.

My short vacation has come to a blunt end.

I had a marvellous weekend doing all sorts of vacationy things: swimming in Walden Pond (with tons of Russians and Latin Americans), going to a Sox game (we won), watching Pirates of the Caribbean (a letdown), and guzzling ale (ginger) at BB’s happy suaree. Best of all, DD returned from three weeks in the oxygenless land of incredible pollution (DC) and now the apartment no longer feels empty and pathetic.

It’s summer, and after 15 minutes back in the office, I wanted to cry. My human rights epoch has reached its apex and is waning now. In a sad, relentless way.

The word NADIR comes to mind as appropriate:

1. Astronomy. A point on the celestial sphere directly below the observer, diametrically opposite the zenith.
2. The lowest point: the nadir of their fortunes.

Most Memorable Moments With The Band on Block Island, 2006:

1. Getting woken up at 4.30a by Ry, crashing into the room, standing over my bed, yelling, “Bon! Bon! There is NO FIRE! Don’t worry, nothing is on fire!” — then running out, giggling hysterically.

2. Racing mopeds (backwoods motor scooter, actually) around a rented house of three inebriated fans at three in the morning. Ry won. Between the wet grass and the crochet paraphanalia in the yard, I was too scared of wiping out to go as insanely fast as he went. Afterwards, we both laughed at discovering our mutual thought, while racing, had been what our mothers would say if/when they found out how we severed a limb in an effort to pass eachother on a curve, full speed.

3. Driving the mopeds through the woods a little after three in the morning, through potholes on a dirt road with Mattie. We picked up D. and C. and revved back into the black night, two to a vehicle, Mattie shaking visably, me reciting the 91st Psalm into the darkness.

4. D., overwhelmingly stoned (etc.), asking me, in the middle of a too-loud set, about God and sin and Jesus and Truth and, in essence, explaining why I don’t drink or eat their pot cookies. Every five minutes he’d walk away, then emerge from the soundboard a few minutes later with another question about spiritual consciousness, or karma, or what life is about. This was a random, serene, oddly fun moment, in the midst of drums and guitars and wailing.

5. The Czech, Polish and Ukranian 20-somethings who were living in the same boarding house for the summer, serving bagels to tourists and learning English and blaring Eastern European TV shows long into the night, as I lay on the other side of the wall, fanatically reading and loathing Lolita.

6. The sun coming out just as we were leaving, the temperature rising 20 degrees overnight, and all of us getting horribly sunburnt (ok, just me; everyone else got butter-brown tans) on the ferry back, with our faces to the wind and the wind on the sea and the sun on everything.

…but fortunately, I bought a sweatshirt and longer pants the second we got here. It’s been raining on and off, like a distracted weeping child.

Block Island has been interesting…I naively forgot the myriad subtleties of the groupy band scene, all of which I notoriously loathe: the distribution of too many weed-laced pastries, drunk boys, late nights, a complete lack of itinerary, bleached-haired girls. I also forgot that Ry and I are different variations of the same person, and we get mad in the same inflammatory, annoying way; and we hold silent grudges of defensiveness until the other person apologizes for their inflammatory conduct, and by that time it’s late afternoon and we really haven’t done much with the day.

Ry is upset that his band isn’t hanging out altogether; rather, it’s become “every man for himself,” as he says, so he’s been pouting, justifiably so, as we each go off in groups of ones and twos to get sand in our toes and loiter too long in Java & Juice. We managed to make a day of it, though, and despite the cold air and grey clouds, I ran in the choppy ocean (mostly because I really had to pee and there was no bathroom, save the waves) and we threw a frisbee and picked up rocks and got lost driving and ate free bar food and, I dunno, people now are wandering around somewhere before the second show begins.

They sell salt water taffy here, which reminds me desperately of Philadelphia summers with my grandmother.

I’m reading Lolita, which, in all of its painstaking awfulness, I can’t disgard until I’ve finished.

Block Island, despite its hecatombs of loud blonde children from Somewhere Else, is beautiful. Weaving between the rolling hills and the bluffs, the 50-foot cliffed drop to the sea, I vowed to come back here someday, but not until I can afford to. Presently, I remain all too grateful for the unglamorous but free accomodations (an extra twin bed in Ry’s comped boarding room, no free soap) and for the coffee, which is excellent.

Ta.

With the words “input” and “output” currently in overabundant use at my office, my urge to freak out and quit my job and/or move to Thailand or Ecuador is ever-increasing. For the moment, I’m settling for reapplying to grad school, this time at my half alma mater, Emerson, for their New Media masters program. If I get in, I could start as early as January. But that would mean a full fellowship would have to fall from the sky and into my lap.

Are there any philanthropists out there who’d like to fund me, much like the anonymous philanthropist who funded my undergrad education? In exchange, I will start a global multimedia production company and name it after you. No, i’m not kidding. I will also water your plants when you go on vacation.

Speaking of vacation, I’m off to Block Island tomorrow with the band: four days of ferries and beaches and evening shows and unglamorous motels where we crash on the floor like college students. I plan on eating lots of fruit and reading lots of books, which is probably the classiest itinerary you can come up with for a half-week vacation with five psuedo-employed musicians in Rhode Island.

I don’t know what “Fratelli D’italia!” means, but DD used it so I assume it’s apropos to descibe the madness of the World Cup yesterday.

Seriously, do you know why Zidane head-butt Materazzi? No? Well, your mom does.

> Zidane appeared to react to something that was said and was dismissed for his violent charge into his opponent.

“He told me Materazzi said something very serious to him but he wouldn’t tell me what,” agent Alain Migliaccio told BBC Five Live Sport.

Sources in France say it is believed Materazzi insulted Zidane’s mother.

In that order. Which says something about the depth of my rage.

I came home and immediately began sobbing tonight, alone, in the kitchen. The backwards series of events leading to my continuing emotional breakdown begins with babysitting, as it often does, on another evening when the mom was in the other room, “working”, as is often the case. When I arrived, she’d made dinner, but none to share with me, as the dad always does. Nope. They ate it all. She didn’t even offer me an apple (did she figure I would help myself? Did she figure I ate dinner already, at the office?). I immediately set to work washing their dishes and didn’t eat anything save a stolen cookie when the kids weren’t looking. The rest of the night dragged on with both kids talking down to me, the older one treating me like hired help and/or a small, annoying, uneducated dog, which is what she does when she feels insecure for whatever reason. Nevertheless, I tried to be understanding instead of judgemental, but it was an effort. After sufficiently belittling me, the girl ended up in hysterics over two losing games of SORRY and ran in to her mother, after which her mother came upstairs and waved me away with a flat “You can go.”

I never got to talk to her about the $100 memory card her son ganked from my phone the other day.

And I realized after leaving that they’re all going away in a few days, for several weeks, during which time their poor little teenage Polish au pair will arrive and move in with them, eliminating, in essence, any future need for my services. This was probably the last time I’d be there, and I didn’t even get paid, and I didn’t even get a goodbye, least of all a Thank You for 4 years of co-raising the children.

I went home starving, trying to let the rage flowing through my body evaporate into the urban evening, since it would probably do no good for my skin, my psyche, my spiritual development or my interpersonal skills. At last divulging my memory of the night’s myriad unpleasantness, I got to my apartment only to discover a few living and a few dead baby roaches hanging out in my kitchen. That’s when I burst into tears, mopped fanatically, made a grilled cheese sandwich, disinfected the table — again — and cried more. In that order.

Then the doorbell rang, and thank God it was my wonderful wonderful landlord. The bad news is, the previous tenants had reported seeing a few of the aforementioned insects after dragging home a chair they’d found off the street. The landlord had bombed the place, then cleaned, but neglected to mention it to DD or me, assuming said vermin had been eliminated. The good news is, he promises now to poison them, gas them, hire professional help if necessary, plug all the crevices in the floors, even tear up and retile the entire kitchen.

“My wife hates roaches,” he told me. So do I! So do I! “I gotta get rid of them before they move upstairs,” he growled, highly perturbed, which was exactly the reaction I was looking for. And then he threw out the rug in the shared foyer, and he cleaned the floor, and I suddenly felt much better, even though DD later told me, via a hotel room outside DC, that you can never really completely eliminate roaches; you can just keep killing them. I really hope that isn’t true.

Needless to say, long nights, aforementioned domestic emergencies and an overheating MacBook Pro have kept me from working on video projects, which need to get done ASAP. But it’s summer, praise be to Allah, and next week I will spend a blissful three days on the beach at Block Island with Ry and 20 of his closest friends. Hallelujah.

I spent the Independence holiday much the same way I did last year: with Ry, only this year his van is much bigger and European-looking.

We kicked off July 3 with a biannual pilgrimage to Oleana, otherwise known as the best Mediterranean fusion restaurant on the East Coast, slurping up spicy carrot puree & Egyptian spice mix with nuts & olive oil, trout spanakopitta with avocado taramasalata and baked Alaska with coconut ice cream & passionfruit caramel. All of which, needless to say, made me want to ascend, right then and there.

Afterwards, we again drove off to Ry’s friend’s parents’ mansion in Nahant, just like last year, where the family always hosts a live music jamboree with food and a picturesque view: jagged cliffs dropping to the sea, a slate sky, a garden. As usual, it was ridiculous, and I did what I always do in happy social situations with people I don’t really know: I went off by myself, this time spending an hour in a hammock in the garden.

El dia de independencia started out pretty lame, trapsing around the city in the rain with Ry and a pleasant member of his female entourage. By a stroke of luck, we ended up bumping into pretty much everyone from The Burren and followed them to a party at someone’s house on the 11th floor of a high rise directly across from the barge on the river where the fireworks canons line up. The fireworks were pretty awesome, seeing as I could reach out and almost touch them, and, after eating several chocolate cupcakes, the evening ended with me solo head-banging to “More than a feeling” in the livingroom. A good welcome to a good summer.

I’ve started reading about livecoders on Wired, who are, by definition, DJs who “improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.”

You can watch a video clip of a livecoder DJing on YouTube. Does this signal a raver renaissance? Does this mean electronica is back, and edgier (read: geekier) than ever? I want to check it out.

I just sat in my closet for over an hour, reading all my journals from the late 90s and early millenium. Half of them are futile lamentations about DD, whom I now live with. Most of the writing was really bad poetry about how I’m in love with him and therefore, I hate him. It never occured to me to have an actual conversation with him about it…until eight years passed. Funny, how long it takes sometimes, to really grow up.

It’s still. Bugs are dying in the walls. The moon
is shroud in a clouded mourning and on the street,
a gun or firecracker blasts repeatedly, though
I prefer the latter.

Good things always get better
and, when we lay down together instead of eating dinner,
I counted the patterns on the orange curtains I brought you
from the other side of the world. There was a breeze.
You soon snored. Behind the window’s shadows, a new summer sun.
I took a mental photo of that moment so I can stare at it

every July, or high tide, or in the beginning
of every new life I try on. When it doesn’t fit,
I call you and cry, and the wind stops spinning,
and the free birds fly.

Did you notice that? I’m using digits, now that we’re past the twentieth appointment, however it’s only been 15 months since all this started.

And guess WHAT??!

[You say, WHAT?!]

My impacted canine tooth is 85% in! Not, you know, “grown in”, but successfully pulled in artificially. Doc was very happy about that. It’s still not ready to have the bracket yanked off (rather, I’m still not ready, apparently, to endure the wrenching pain of having the bracket yanked off and re-cemented in a better position) so he just laid the wire ON TOP of the canine’s bracket, weird as it sounds, so that the tooth will get pushed down even more, aided by the dang latex elastics I’m still wearing. And now I have to wear elastics on the OTHER canines, too, “because,” explained the doc, “your smile is tilting to one side. So you have to wear elastics on your opposite canines unless you want to smile like this” [tilts head to one side, grinning].

My smile is tilting to one side?
“I.,” I asked the 10-year-old I was babysitting, “Is my smile tilting to one side?”
I. looked up from her book and inspected me, grinning like an idiot.
“Oh, yes. It is.”
Baaaaaah!

The good news is, I’m “in the home stretch,” he says. The hills are alive, the rainbow is in sight, we’ve got the kids and we’re about to finally cross the border. Something like that. I anticipate this means these lovely, expensive, ceramic adult braces will be off, as scheduled, in the fall — not in enough time to attend several September weddings, but at least I’ll be able to chew the chicken or beef entree with all my teeth precisely aligned.

This experience has been, by all accounts, not even kidding, excellent. If you’re in the Boston area and are looking for an awesome (albeit cheeky) adult orthodontist, talk to me.

Work was long, and very busy. I went straight from the office to the kids’ house, sad to miss my coworkers’ after-hours gathering and sadder to miss Critical Mass, the monthly bike entourage of hundreds of cyclists plowing through city streets, much to the rage of Boston drivers.

I decided to try to be optimistic about spending a balmy summer evening with kids, until I realized it’s Mom-Is-Away Behavior Week, where the girl gets uptight and bossy and the boy acts out in odd ways. Tonight he took out the memory card in my mobile phone and, mad that I was making him wait until I finished washing dishes to explain how it worked, hid it somewhere in the kitchen when my back was turned.

“E.,” I said, noticing his scrambled-eggy hands on my phone. “What are you doing? Did you take out the memory card?”
No.
“But it’s gone, so obviously, you did. Where is it?”
Uh, I don’t know.
“You’re telling me it just magically disappered?”
Yes.
“E., that memory card costs upwards of $100. I can’t afford a new one, and I’m not going to buy a new one if you’ve just hidden the existing one. Where is it?”
I don’t know.
“You don’t know?”
Maybe it’s in the kitchen. Maybe you should look again. I don’t know.
“You don’t know?”
I don’t know.

It went on like that for hours. I tried every tactic — being logical; being strict; being nice; being mean — nothing worked. I left with no memory card but with a sense of forgiveness — hey, it’s a little kid, what can you do? No big deal. But then, arriving home at midnight, starving, I opened the door to the foyer to find — UGH! — a large roach on the wall.

DAMMIT! GO AWAY!

This is a metaphor for my state of thought, I thought, or a portentious sign, or something beyond my understanding. I sprayed the thing with bleach but it just fell and crawled back under the wall, the other side of which is our living room. Oh God oh God, I just want to cry cry cry, and I’m so hungry but there’s little food, and I can’t go sobbing to my boyfriend because he’s 600 miles away getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night in a small hotel room on an incredibly stressful business assignment for SEIU. The last thing he needs is my continuing complaints about roaches and the warped psyche of 7-year-olds. I would repeat my lamentations to Ry, who would hold swarms of egregiously-underdressed female fans at bay for the length of my teary phone call, but he’s playing a concert on a tour boat for hundreds of very drunk yuppies as I write. Baaaaaah!

Then again I think, I could be back in Sumatra, peeing in a hole full of hungry mosquitos and eating nothing but palang white rice and smuggled power bars, or I could be back in Mexico, watching the rats crawl up the inside walls to our apartment in Durango and tiny worms boiling with the water in my pot full of spaghetti. Or I could be somewhere in New York state again, sleeping on a motel mattress full of bedbugs, like that time in 1995, after which I remained itchy for about two months.

But I’m not. I’m here, and there’s air conditioning! Let’s take a moment of silence, shall we, in gratitude for the fact that we’re not completely dead yet.