> 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.

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.

Yesterday, driving back from La Interview, I stopped at a red light next to a mini-bus of some sort. Inside, I noticed the driver, an older man wearing a baseball cap who was beating real drum sticks on the steering wheel. He was really going at it. In fact, he seemed to be practising. I thought, here we are in traffic, and this bus driver is beating his heart out on the steering wheel. Is this what we do? We drive buses, or upload web articles, or answer phone calls or send emails during business hours, and in the brief pockets of downtime, we play a beat on the steering wheel, regardless of who’s looking? Because if that’s not how it is, that’s how it should be.

In other news, last night I tricked grimy E. into taking a bath by letting him pour in half a bottle of shampoo so it would seem like a bubble bath, then telling him he could go scuba diving in the bubbles to retrieve pennies i’d thow in while his eyes were closed. Ahaaa! I am so tricky!!

It feels like New Year’s. Not just the cold weather we had yesterday, but the feeling that comes with a birthday — like you can start over, if you want.

We went rock climbing, then had Japanese hotpot and Italian gelato. Today L. visits from San Fran. Next weekend, we begin the downsized move to Dorchester. The world is spinning, and I need book recommendations. Basta.

So J. & J. hitched up the way any self-respecting Gen X’ers would: fast. Classy, on the fly. I had the good fortune to have the day off anyway, so I met them at City Hall to visually document the big event.

Nikolai Cappucino, if you’re reading this, another one of your ladies has retired her number. Her jersey is hanging on the wall by the door — salute it on your way out. And salute mine, too.

AMEN!

Despite my misfortune of not being sent to the Save Darfur Rally in DC as the office photographer/videographer, lovely Claire did a fine job instead, saving the day with this shot of everyone’s favorite activist and filmmaker, Mr. George Clooney, to whom I’d love to write a letter, expressing my…admiration? Admiration. I’d love to work for the man, in any professional capacity.

Mr. Clooney, sir, your personal and political ethics inspire me. Let’s start a multimedia production company! We can co-direct! It’ll be AWESOME!

Yesterday DD and I drove up to Mount Monadnock to photograph/videotape M. & S.’s pre-wedding Ancient Greek-themed all-day rural festivities. Between the rope swings and the tire swings and the sheep and the ponies and the kids and tetherball and lakes and streams, we found a teepie (tippie? teepee?) during down time. It was a good day, a cool place, great weather, fun people. And now Easter has come and gone, and I am not in Philadelphia, but that’s ok.

Also, happy Passover to all my Jews and partial-Jews.

Maisha came to town this weekend for her yearly visit with me. As always, it zapped all the energy out of me like a toaster in a bathtub — here are some words to summarize the past three days, in order as they occured:

running - enchiladas - ice cream - puking - dvds - “bonnie, wake up!” - “bonnie, are you getting up?” - “bonnie, i want a milkshake!” - “bonnie, i wanna go to dunkin’ donuts!” - shoe shopping - baseball in the rain - soccer in the rain - soccer in the sun - soccer with D. - asthma attack - ice cream - playground - piggy back - piggy back - piggy back - malaysian cuisine - crying - whining - crying - driving

(Note: neither the puking nor the asthma attack involved Maisha.)
Kids are tough. Like, really, they’re really tough. Maisha particularly, although at the same time, she’s equally awesome. But I am spent, spent like a lost Benjamin.

Copulate responsibly, people.

I finally published some flash photogalleries of my trip:

INDONESIA

THAILAND

Knock yourself out!

So it wasn’t 24 hours of travel after all. It was 42 hours of travel, with five flights (Phuket > Bangkok > Singapore > Frankfurt > NYC > Boston), all of which were ridiculous and uncomfortable and could have been avoided by booking us on the same direct flight we took the first time…but alas, some things always remain difficult.

I slept 20 hours straight when I got home. My colleague and traveling companion M., however, was not as lucky: she has little boys, and had a dinner party to attend, and had a class to teach at Brandeis this morning, followed by conference calls on Gulf Coast relief. Being merely the lowly staff photographer, my professional duties are limited to captioning the 1,214 Asia photos I took (not kidding, that’s how many I took), writing more about Thailand for our human rights blog and generally being incredibly out-of-it.

I’m cold again, not really ready to be here or be awake. I haven’t unpacked or anything. I think I might cut my hair, just to shake things up. I’d like to take a vacation, or go on some retreat where they make you cry for days, just to purify my situation, as P. Diddy would say. Oddly, I felt more adjusted to life up there alone in those airplanes than I do here in my freezing dining room. I guess, in a way, that makes sense.

…except for tomorrow, when I have to leave Thailand and the Burmese people. I don’t know where to start — HRE has been so awesome. HRE president Htoo Chit is going to win the Nobel Prize someday. He’s an amazing man (student activist leader turned 12-year jungle-dwelling guerilla fighter turned human rights CEO) who’s created an incredibly well-functioning development org for other Burmese refugees here in Thailand, and his staff are young and smart and awesome and almost all undocumented. “Ever been to the US?” I asked one of them. “No,” she giggled, and then I realized why she giggled: she can’t leave Thailand. She’s not even supposed to be in Thailand. She doesn’t have a passport, or even a birth certificate. And yet she’s teaching women’s health programs to migrant worker families, and her colleagues are running nurseries, taking care of orphans, adopting other children, and offering us oranges and Fantas and homemade bracelets before we leave. I felt like a total idiot.

Tonight we were invited to a dinner with all the staff and teachers. They played games, acted things out, danced, and sang: did you know “Dust in the wind” was actually first the melody for Burma’s song for democracy? Well, it was and still is. And when they sang it tonight — twice: once because they wanted to, once because we asked them to sing it again — they raised their fists and closed their eyes and wrapped their arms around each other and I realized how powerful and terrible it must be to love your country so much but not be able to return without getting abused or killed. “Are you homesick?” someone asked one of the new staff members, recently arrived from Burma. “Yes,” he said, “But I think we are all homesick, all the time.”

“Htoo Chit should run for office,” I told M. “When Burma is free, he probably will,” she said. And then it hit me how important this whole trip is.

That said, we begin the journey home — four flights in 24 hours — tomorrow afternoon. Thailand, and Burmese, you rock.

This is Haslah, from the village of Paya Bili, East Aceh. Her village was completely burned by the army two years ago. Since the ceasefire agreement (MoU) last August, the violence has subsided, but only 7 families out of 58 have returned here. They have nothing, but they’re starting the slash-and-burn process to begin growing crops again (watermelon, chili, soya beans, green beans). Haslah had her face kicked repeatedly when the army came. She wrapped her arms around their legs and begged them not to kill her chickens or burn her crops, but they kicked out her teeth and burned everything anyway. She really wanted her photo taken, even though she was crying telling me the story, because no one has helped this village at all. She wants the story to get out, she wants her face to be seen. Her friend Zainabon kept rubbing my skin to see if it would rub off. I was a big party favor in this little village. A very powerful visit.

In Jakarta now, feeling much better, enjoying air conditioning and showers and toilet paper and running water in general. Off to Bangkok, then Phuket, Thailand tomorrow.

And, briefly, DOUGHERTY’S INDEX for March 2006:

Number of times a man walked in on me peeing in a baday, then screamed: 2
Number of times I’ve used the duct tape S. insisted I pack: 5
Number of power bars I’ve consumed in the past eight days: 12
Number of elephants spotted on the side of the road: 1
Number of wild monkeys: 14

“Ka! Ka!” the kids yelled to me. You, hey you…

Indonesia is hard. I’m not tough enough. I can’t endure the intense heat and humidity, the Palang food (apparently), the lack of toilets and running water. It’s just hard. If it were, I dunno, 30 degrees cooler, I think I’d be fine. But it’s like 90-something and it’s just very difficult.

After our four-hour drive, during which I saw an ELEPHANT and a MONKEY on the side of the road, I spent half of our partner visits yesterday sleeping in the back of the car with the motor running and air conditioning on. I’ve restricted my diet to power bars and Sprite. But feeling sorry for myself isn’t very satisfying, especially when I go to small rural villages and befriend swarms of Muslim children who survived the tsunami at their doorsteps last year, and who chase me through the unpaved streets until I photograph them. The older girls wanted to see their pictures on the digital camera LCD, but hesistated. I had to notice that they wanted to be photographed because they wouldn’t ask. These two were inseparable. Behind them you can see how much land was destroyed when the water came in, and the houses being (re)built to the left.

We walked around Philly’s Magic Gardens, filled with trash and bike rims and teacups glued together, before beginning the drive home.

You should all contribute photos (yes, you in Hawaii, you in the City of Sin, you in New York, you at Harvard, you in South Asia) to Round’s Photoblog. The theme for the next two weeks is portraits. If you’d like to contribute something, email me so we can set you up with a login.

S. is here, being international. It’s been over a year since we lived in the UK together. Now we crouch on the sidewalks of Boston at midnight in January, contemplating where to go next. I’m going nowhere, yet.

Because, if you leave your socks in a pile on your bed for 10 days and no new Netflix movies have arrived, your roommates will inevitably find some way of occupying their time…

Josh is here for his annual visit. He is the funnest little brother I’ve ever had. We rage. We also dance around the room singing MJB and Ashlee Simpson songs in front of the video camera, which is several kinds of awesome.

check out round’s photo blog. i’m just beginning to post things there more regularly, instead of here.

I totally just ordered these with my father’s giftcards. I think it represents a larger manifestation of my inherent desire to dress as weird as possible, evidenced in part by the communion of my horizontal striped shirt and vertical striped pants today.