Is it Friday already?

Oosp. Things aren't actually upside-down yet, but they're about to be. Starting right after this post, actually. But anyway, this time next week we shall be unpacking boxes and officially moved in to our new place. Oh and I graduate on Monday. I'd be excited but I really hate ceremonies and I don't know anybody I'm graduating with so it's a bit of a pain. Ameel and some friends of ours will be there, but frankly I'm a little sorry to put them through the 2.5 hours of watching people walk across a stage. I'm a bit sorry about putting myself through it too. Bah, humbug.

But to make up for somehow missing Thursday, here's that iPod advert song:

And since you're going to want to sing along, here are the lyrics.

Moving time

As the post title might have told you, we're moving! We just did the requisite signing and I'm about to book the movers and then the sorting shall begin. I'm really excited. I absolutely love moving (and yes, I have been told I'm not right in the head already, thank you). How much do I love moving? When I was about 17 months old and made my first move from Sri Lanka to Islamabad, I apparently packed myself into one of the boxes the movers had brought over. Panic and drama ensued, but I missed it all because I was napping. My second move, from Islamabad to Geneva, happened when I was 4 and I remember being constantly underfoot (and being stepped on as a result) because I wanted to 'help' by packing all my toys myself. Since my parents didn't want to tell me that they'd dumped my toys, I was told they'd got lost on the way. Bad idea. I was 7 when we moved again and I made bloody sure every last toy got packed and sent off properly. Of course then we put them into storage and rats ate them, but that's not the point.

The point is, I love moving because it gives me a chance to review where I've been, pick and choose what I want to take with me, and discard the rest. It's a clean slate, a fresh start and all that. Even when it's a tiny suburb-to-suburb move like this one, it's still a good way of clearing out the stuff I invariably accumulate when I'm in one place for any length of time. It's as if things - papers particularly -  get sucked into my orbit and I can't shake them loose - a bit like the way staticky cellophane just won't come off - unless I do something drastic like move house. And as I discard physical objects, I often end up discarding a lot of baggage of the other kind as well. I decide again and again whether something I've carried with me for years and years is really really really worth keeping and sometimes, even though I've always thought I couldn't possibly be without it, the time comes to let it go. It's always a bit of a surprise, but it happens. Some things I don't think I'll ever get rid of, like my two Sri Lankan good luck devils or the little amethyst ring my mother got when I was born, or ticket stubs from the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, or the other random little things that it makes me happy to look at because they remind me of where I've been - that I've really been there and I didn't imagine it all.

What I certainly haven't imagined is the deadline we're working to now. It's not that bad really - we've packed and moved a six-bedroom house in a day so this little shoebox and its contents shouldn't be a problem. At least in theory. What actually happens remains to be seen.

The PC police strike again

Sunday's edition of Australian newspaper the Age carried this story about how early Sesame Street shows dating from 1974 and earlier are too un-PC for today's child. Apparently Oscar, the Cookie Monster, and even Big Bird are inappropriate role models since they are unhygienic and antisocial, gluttonous, and delusional (remember when Snuffy was imaginary?), respectively, and therefore unfit for children to watch because, you know, children are little simpletons who might think that all these things that all these strange looking puppets do are somehow ok in the real world.

Say what?

There are a couple of assumptions here that I have a problem with:

1. Children are too stupid to distinguish fantasy from reality and will therefore ape any kind of behavior they see on tv.
2. Children must be protected and ushered through their childhoods with as little contact with reality because it might scar them for life.

First of all, children are not that stupid. Even the children of the delusional, gluttonous and socially retarded members of my generation are not that stupid. Their parents, on the other hand, I can't vouch for. But I do know that most children are able to separate make-believe from reality, even when they don't want to, which is why fantasy, particularly for children, has always had a place in human culture. One of the first things we're taught is limits; what we can and can't do is spelled out for us constantly as we grow up. It is important, therefore, to be able to escape into a world with no (or different) limits so that we may exercise our imaginations safe in the knowledge that what we are doing is imaginary.

It seems to me that it isn't children who confuse fantasy with reality but their parents. Witness the rising tide of emotionalism and deliberate Oprah-style renunciation of rationality in exchange for touchy-feely "you're all special because you think you're special" nonsense. Yes, for the price of one DVD, you too can have the secret to untold wealth, happiness, success and good teeth.
Which takes me to the second issue: reality. Reality means the stuff in the real actual world. You know, the one out there, that comes packed with grouches, hedonists, delusional people, and a whole lot more. Given that you're going to have to deal with them anyway, mightn't it be a good idea to have a practice run or two? Or maybe just the exposure so that when you come across someone who doesn't think you're the specialest special little thing in the whole wide world, you can actually cope?

The article also quotes the head of children's programming at the ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as saying that even if a tiny minority of children mimic the behaviors they see on screen, the program in question should not be shown. By that logic, children shouldn't be shown anything at all or allowed to read or speak or play or think because you never know when exposure to something as radical as scarfing down a plate of cookies could do serious damage to their psyches. And if we stunt an entire generation of children in the process, so what? At least they'll all be svelte and clean and utterly unimaginative.

I am not a parent (and things like this make me even more glad that I never need to be), but I certainly was a child and I seem to remember the biggest lessons coming from those two people who had the job of raising me, not the silly images I saw on the telly. I wonder, in all our analysis of the effect of anything and everything on the fragile psyches of children, have we forgotten entirely about the role of parents?

Memory Meme

Penni's guest-blogging at Inside A Dog this month (twice the fun!) and did an earliest memory meme, so I'm picking it up too. Hey, I should be blogging and writing and am doing neither at the moment, so this is a good thing. Seriously.

My earliest memory is of sounds - my father brushing his teeth, the clatter of crockery when my family had breakfast, more clattering when my grandmother came home from work, the car horn when my father came back from work, the sound that the front door of my grandmother's house made when someone opened it, the different sounds each ceiling fan in the house made. Layered on top of that are smells - porridge and toast and chocolate milk and laundry and slightly damp clothes being ironed and the smell of the jasmine we'd collect in the evenings to make into garlands. The dominant smell isn't really a smell though - it's the dry, slightly grainy smell that seemed to follow the sunshine around. Inside, outside, in cars, in other people's houses, I could smell it underneath all the other smells. These are all Islamabad smells and sounds though - I don't have any memory of Sri Lanka that I know of.

The first full thing I remember is the day, when I was about 2 or 3 years old, that I realized adults didn't always tell you the truth. I'd asked about something - I don't recall what but, knowing me, it was probably badly-timed and 'inappropriate' - and had received some sort of vague, nonsense answer. I was walking up the four steps that linked my parents' room to the rest of the house and I remember the moment not just because it was when it clicked that the answer I'd got wasn't true but because it was when I realized that I could tell. I remember also realizing pretty quickly that it wouldn't be a good idea to tell the grownups that I was on to them. Instead I decided that I needed to learn to read asap so I find out for myself.

I remember my mother being ill and in bed a lot and being kept away from her because of it, which I didn't mind because the room she was in always smelled metallic and cold. That's also probably why I have so many memories of my grandparents. One very clear memory is of looking at the Margalla hills from the back windows of the house and being fascinated by the shapes at the very tops of the hills. Trees, as it turned out, but my grandfather saw me looking and told me that they were monkeys who were observing my behavior. I still get a little creeped out when I see them.

I don't remember what my mix of languages was pre-Geneva, but I do remember not speaking Punjabi because one day my brother and I decided to make an effort to speak it (or rather I decided and since he had nobody else to play with, he had to go along with me). Our parents were very amused and of absolutely no help at all, which was frustrating because I wanted to learn it. Later when we moved to Geneva and the number of languages around us diminished enough for me to pick up on the Turkish my parents spoke, I tried doing the same thing, with the same result. They didn't want us to learn Turkish either.

I do agree with Penni about first-borns being the memory-keepers of the family. Being older, I naturally remember more than my brother does, but the odd thing is that I often seem to remember more than my parents as well. Actually it's probably not more overall but just more things specific to our family unit since I didn't have the 'noise' of work and family and friends and all that. On top of that, since we moved around so much, my brother and I were probably a lot more focused on our parents and each other than other children our age.

Hey if anyone decides to do this meme, let me know.

Here comes summer - and this time I'm ready, punk

Even though I'm dreading the trip to the library that I have to make in just a bit, I think I might not be entirely unhappy about the coming of summer. I generally like the end of the year, and I generally dislike the heat. Of the two though, it seems my fondness for the last two months of the year is greater than my dislike of the heat, specially when Australia seems to enjoy it so much (barring the bushfires, of course). Holidays, Christmas, carols by the lake, long lazy days - I think I see the appeal.

Now the thing is, the way I know for sure that the season's turned is not the weather forecast as such but my nose and arms. There's a difference in the way the air smells and feels in each season, just as there is before rainfall. In autumn, the air begins to feel more dense and seems to hit the front of my nose as I breathe. That first whiff of ozone means that winter is setting in. When the air expands enough to carry the smell of grass and flowers, it's spring. And when it expands so much that it fills not just your nose but your whole mouth with every breath, it's summer. Which is unfortunate, because summer is also when everything starts to stink.

You know what I'm talking about. Bad smells just don't seem as bad in winter - either the air is too still to carry them or it's windy and you're too busy feeling miserable and cold to register this annoyance at the tip of your nose. But in summer, with every air molecule taking up far more space than is decent, odors invade your consciousness, forcing you not just to smell them but to taste them as well. Even relatively good smells can turn cloying or unpleasant in this kind of weather.

On the train today, for instance, people had clearly taken their cue from the predicted high of 36 degrees Celsius and been extra generous with the deodorant and other nice-smelling stuff. In itself, this is something to be appreciated and encouraged, specially on tightly packed trains and trams. But when you mix that many different smells together in that kind of concentration, they will blend to create an overall scent. Unfortunately for Melburnians, the smell they seem to create when they all huddle together on public transport is: Baygon. And I don't mean the politely scented bug sprays you get here in the first world, either. I'm talking about the stuff they sell in South Asia: unadulterated poison that can stop a rat-sized daddy-roach in its tracks and half choke you to death in the process.

Still, it was better than that other harbinger of summer: body odor. There is something inherently upsetting about BO, I find - something as invasive and offensive as cigarette smoke in a closed room. Much like cigarette smoke, BO is often also unapologetic. It has no problem with its existence; you're the one with the problem. Which is why I dread sitting in the aisle seat in trams because sooner or later it will get crowded enough and someone will reach for the strap hanging above my head and, in doing so, will expose their stinky underarms. Being short, standing doesn't really provide any respite - it can, in fact make it worse if, as often happens, I'm about armpit-height to the (usually male, usually large) offender.

So I have devised a strategy.
It's simple, really. Carry a can of antiperspirant deodorant and, when confronted with a foul armpit, spray liberally. If the recipient raises a fuss, you can always claim self-defense. Think about it. Rather than waiting it out by burying your nose into the recesses of your handbag or just hand or sleeve or anything else you may have with you that smells better than these atmosphere polluters, DO something about it. And since you can't very well carry around soap and water to offer them a wash, this is the next best thing. It won't keep the smell away so much as mask it, but hey, the goal is to make your own life easier, not give hygiene lessons.

Vigilante deodorizing. Give it a try today.

Catching up

I've been hibernating the last few months and have consequently missed out on a lot that's been happening online and off. The biggest news, of course, is that Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, leaving himself the only law of the land. L'etat, c'est lui, indeed.

Kyla has been writing about the situation steadily and about her participation in the Lahore protest on  Nov 5.

Ameel has blogged about the situation as well, explaining rather well why Musharraf was able to gain our trust and support back when he took over and why people with foresight and a grasp of history insisted that, for all the good he may have been doing, having him around was still a bad idea.

Both Kyla and Ameel have linked to other blogs that are reporting on happenings on the ground.  The Internet's the only source of information we have really since television and radio channels have been taken off the air and newspapers are not allowed to print anything critical of the government. GEO is alive and well online, though a notice on the site says that they're not putting too much content up because of the heavy traffic they've been getting. Dawn is also operating online despite having been muzzled by the new press ordinance. I don't know if there's a difference between their print and online versions at the moment since I haven't got access to the newspaper itself.

I've said this elsewhere so I may as well do so here: the crap the US and UK are spouting about democracy and the elections and their 'insistence' that both be returned is just that. It's for show only. If members of civil society and the government were able to predict that this would happen if Musharraf stuck around too long, so was the US (and when I say 'US' I mean the States as well as its little pets). Yes, democracy and the constitution should be upheld and elections should be held, yes the army should get out of government, but the idea that it should or could be done because a foreign government that is interested only in using the patch of land that happens to be Pakistan says so is unacceptable. What earthly difference does it make to the US what kind of government exists in Pakistan? The fact is, it doesn't. So long as said government does not interfere with the US's goals in the area, it's really none of the US's concern who runs the country.  This very visible media-friendly hand-wringing is, to mix metaphors, a lot of lip-service to public opinion back home (since some of them might actually know what a Pakistan is and will therefore be concerned that their super-duper government isn't effectively enlightening us benighted savages) and little else.

So instead of listening to their protestations and proclamations, divert yourselves with  Musharraf's amended press ordinance and the now-suspended constitution of Pakistan.

Thursday music

Why not?

The perennially soppy James Blunt's 1973 actually got to me. Not that I was around in 1973 itself, but the song and video capture some of the nostalgia that's been plaguing me lately. I quite like the way the video's done, with the street and shops lighting up as he passes. I think it captures the feeling of going back to a place you used to know well. The editing towards the end of the song, when the music picks up a bit, is just lovely and I like the way the dancing's been filmed. The whole thing makes me think of Kathmandu because that's one place I did actually go back to and still want to return to at some point. In the mean time, the song's good to sigh to.

Armistead Maupin in Brisbane

Armistead Maupin was here and I missed him. *sniff*. Buuut, thanks to the wonders of teh tubes, here's a link to his talk at the Brisbane Writers' Festival as broadcast on the Book Show on ABC Radio. This'll take you the page about the talk where you can either listen to it or download it for later. Click me.

In it, he reads a bit from his new book Michael Tolliver Lives and then gives a bit of a directed talk. I loved hearing him read, and I love that Mouse is back and that Anna Madrigal is still alive and kicking.

Maupin makes some excellent points about visibility for the GLBTI community and why it's important for authors and artists to align themselves with it if they happen to be part of it (or even if they don't, really). He takes on Gore Vidal's refusal to do so particularly well, and I think he's right. If it really was just about who you have sex with and nothing else, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal. It becomes a big deal though because being gay or lesbian or bi has to do with who you love and who you build a life with - that's what gets up people's noses because it says to them that there are other, reasonable, valid ways of living than theirs. I just find it funny how, despite the lip service payed to loving one's neighbor, charity, community, etc., hate is by far the easiest emotion to stir in people. Anyway, not getting onto that soapbox just yet. Listen to Maupin.

Clowning around

I have to admit clowns make me nervous, but this is just awesome. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, or CIRCA, is a group of actual, trained clowns that, according to its website
...aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion - adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth.

The rebel clowns that make up CIRCA embody life's contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.

Rebel Clowns are trained by CIRCA recruiting officers, using a variety of different exercises, training includes finding your inner clown, civil disobedience tactics, learning to be spontaneous and playful, practicing clown gaggle manoevers and last but not least marching and drilling.

They got a chance to put the training to excellent use at a VNN/Nazi rally held in Knoxville in May this year. I found the story thanks to Belledame222 over at Fetch Me My Axe who posted an excerpt from an Indymedia article describing how the clowns completely took the wind out of their white supremacist sails.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

There's a more sober account of it in the local newspaper that focuses more on why the rally was held and talks about the arrest of its organizer, who apparently couldn't control his rage at the clowns and attempted to attack them, then resisted arrest. Tsk tsk.

I think this is brilliant, not just because I love it when people get all subversive, but because CIRCA really does what clowns/fools/madmen through the ages (at least those we know of, starting with the Greeks) were meant to do: hold up a mirror to society and reveal all the really ugly bits we'd rather not deal with.

The Bourne Ultimatum…wow…

What crap.

Seriously.

Ameel loved it. Stephanie Zacharek, who writes brilliant reviews for Salon, loved it. I'm sure other people did and do as well.

And there were good things about it. I liked the way the story began right where the previous movie left off, that the end looped back to the beginning, that the bad guys seemed likely to see some kind of justice. I also like the way the story looks at identity as a construct of our memories and the dissociation that happens when one loses or at least can't locate those memories. All good stuff, all interesting. I have no issues with the story itself or the larger metaphorical tale-of-our-times stuff that everyone's raving about.

No. The issues I had with the movie had more to do with the way it was put together. Did we really need all those over-the-shoulder shots of intensely intense eyes being all intense? Did we really? And all from the same angle too? Oh and how about that shaking camera? Nothing like feeling carsick in the middle of a movie theatre to put the finishing touch on your cinematic experience. And that chase in Tangier that some people loved? Oy. Yes you can run over rooftops and through windows, open or not, but do you have to do it for ten whole minutes? And yes you can beat the living shit out of the guy out to kill you, but could you, um, well just get it over with already? First you slam the guy into a wall, then you get slammed into a bookcase, then it's other random bits of furniture, then a huge mirror, then you get books involved, then you take it to the bathroom whose fixtures, naturally, come into play, and then, finally, finally, the baddie croaks. Phew. Well that was close. Because, with about half the movie's running time left, there was a big question mark there about whether the title character would make it. Yeesh.

Oh and please, let us not forget the silences. The long, meaningful, significant and deeply, deeply, deeply annoying silences. Yes, yes, he's alone and isolated. Yes the dead girlfriend is still 'there' (and far more substantial than poor ol' Julia Stiles without even being in the frame). Yes there's a story there with Stiles's character, but please somebody bloody say something. I'm all for tension building and such, but this was frustrating because the actors were so busy emoting their little guts out that they forgot to engage with anything. What is this, acting by numbers? Ameel pointed out that it might have just been bad editing, and I'd like to believe that if only because I like Stiles and I think that even in a crappy role she brings something interesting to the screen. If I can blame someone else for her crappiness, I'd like to.

One of the best scenes of the movie was utterly ruined because they show it, or at least all the important bits of it, in the trailer. God I hate it when they do that. And the less said about that inane car chase the better.

This movie annoyed me because, with all the potential there was for a truly fantastic ending to an interesting story, we got this shoot-em-up drivel rife with oh-look-I'm-pretending-to-be-a-spy speak. By the time it ended, I had no idea how it had begun, who had done what to whom, why, when, where and, quite honestly, I didn't care. Bourne gets his memory back and lives to swim out of the East River, bad men get arrested, Julia smiles to herself in a coffee shop, and all's right with the world. Lovely.

<Insert rude noise of choice>

Dogs and kids

Or, more properly, one dog and one kid.

Clearly the dog is used to this and the baby's delighted, so it's probably not at all dangerous. The last shot when the baby puts his little hand on the dog's jaw is my favorite. It's so trusting. At the same time, the confidence makes it look dominant, which makes me think that the child already knows how to handle dogs, specially such gentle, cuddly ones. Adorable as the whole thing is though, I can't help getting a little knot in my stomach at the fact that the dog's jaw is about the same width as the child.

Writing time

So while waiting for the cake to get done, I read Jerry Oltion's 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work over at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website. Some great ideas there, specially if you are as pathologically distractable as I am. I love that he's collected all these because, while some people can use just the one strategy throughout their lives, he tends to subvert any given strategy after a while and so needs to switch tactics to get results. I do that. I do that more often than I admit. Subvert, that is. It's not that I don't like writing or find it tedious or anything - writing (and dancing) give me more joy than anything else. It's just getting started, which requires sifting through ideas to find the one or two or three most worth developing. And as soon as I get started on one, another pops up to distract me, so I follow it up for a while, until another one pops up, and so on. So I've got tons of beginnings and endings (I like endings), but not a whole lot to go in the middle.

I also find goal-oriented writing much more easy than just writing for the hell of it. I'm happy with deadlines. Stressed, freaked, overcaffeinated, sleepless, and generally unpleasant to be around, but happy. But artificial goals don't fool me. For a writer, I'm quite resistant to the whole suspension of disbelief thing. (Made me a frustrating kid too, because I wouldn't believe that drains gurgled because there were tigers trapped in them. Drain small, tiger big. Does not compute.) So the thing to do is to hornswaggle another person into writing with you. That way, you have the stress of not letting the other person down to keep you at the keyboard. I've only had one writing 'date' so far, but with another one this Friday it's actually working. Or I am, rather. Well, except for the cake baking and the blogging, but I have excuses for that.

Well, like, duh.

Not so hot on the man-hater qualifier. You're lovely, fellas, but really, everything isn't about you, you know? And can't men hate men? And...

...it's a blogthing, Nadia. Let it go.








You Are 100% Feminist


You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

Are You a Feminist?

Third Culture Kids/Global Nomads

One of the best things about Facebook has been the groups set up by and for Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and people who've attended international schools around the world. Recently, the term 'global nomad' seems to be gaining more currency. It's more appealing because it doesn't force a reference to one's childhood. TCKs grow up too, in our own way, and we're hardly unique in having our childhood experiences resonate through our lives.

Anyway, some of the groups have 'you know you're a TCK when....' lists to which everyone appends their own experiences. I've collected my favorites here. 

You know you're a TCK when:

- "Where are you from?" has more than one reasonable answer.
- You flew before you could walk.
- You speak two languages, but can’t spell in either.
- You feel odd being in the ethnic majority.
- You have three passports.
- You have a passport but no driver's license.
- Your life story uses the phrase "Then we moved to..." three (or four, or five...) times.
- You wince when people mispronounce foreign words.
- You don't know whether to write the date as day/month/year, month/day/year, or some variation thereof.
- The best word for something is the word you learned first, regardless of the language.
- You think VISA is a document that's stamped in your passport, not a plastic card you carry in your wallet.
- You own personal appliances with 3 types of plugs, know the difference between 110 and 220 volts, 50 and 60 cycle current, and realize that a trasnsformer isn't always enough to make your appliances work.
- You fried a number of appliances during the learning process.
- Half of your phone calls are unintelligible to those around you.
- You consider a city 500 miles away "very close."
- You get homesick reading National Geographic.
- Your minor is a foreign language you already speak.
- When asked a question in a certain language, you've absentmindedly respond in a different one.
- You understand all sorts of accents, having a mix of them yourself.
- You've gotten out of school because of monsoons, bomb threats, and/or popular demonstrations.
- You speak with authority on the subject of airline travel.
- You have frequent flyer accounts on multiple airlines.
- You constantly want to use said frequent flyer accounts to travel to new places.
- When you have a favorite seat on the plane
- You know how to pack.
- You have the urge to move to a new country every couple of years.
- The thought of sending your (hypothetical) kids to public school scares you, while the thought of letting them fly alone doesn't at all.
- You think that high school reunions are all but impossible.
- You have friends from 29 different countries.
- You sort your friends by continent.
- You have a time zone map next to your telephone.
- You realize what a small world it is, after all.
- You go into culture shock upon returning to your "home" country. 
- When discussing global issues, you're all sides of an argument by yourself.
-When you practically jump someone when you find out they're also a TCK.
-You switch between words like "jumper" and "sweater" or "airplane" and "aeroplane", depending on location and company.
-You swear in a myriad of languages.
-Sleep is for the weak. Or layovers.
-Itchy feet has nothing to do with the health of your feet.
- When you've memorized the airplane safety precautions by heart
-You've said goodbye forever to more people already than most "normal" people will in their whole lives.
- The idea of retiring in one place freaks you out
- When you understand languages you've never heard before just from the speaker's body language
- When 'going to see a friend' generally means travelling halfway across the world.
-You have no idea where you'll be in the next 5 years. And the thought doesn't scare you at all. Rather, the thought of actually having long term plans scares you.
-You don't know whether to greet people with a nod, handshake, one-arm hug, proper hug, one kiss, two kisses, or three kisses and usually end up looking grouchy or invasive.
-The smell of international terminals and airplanes makes you feel homesick.
-When you have your diplomatic or official passport replaced with a civilian one at 21.
-You had to take TOEFL even though English is your first language.
-You're not sure what your 'native' language is because your mom speaks X, your dad speaks Y, and you've lived in a whole other country where you've learned Z.
-When the most mindboggling thing about college is that you will spend four years in the same school.
- You pretty much know that if a friend doesn't have a cell phone/ screen name you'll probably never talk to them again.
- Your first kiss spoke a language you no longer remember.
-Your best friend lives a thousand miles away, but it's not *that* far.
- You think in different languages
-You use countries to identify defining moments in your life.
-You've never been to the country you were born in.
- You automatically know what time it is across the world
- You have an inbuilt calculator when it comes to exchange rates
- You know the strength of the dollar/pound/euro as well as those of the respective countries you and your spread out family are residing in at all times
- You don't really own any furniture because you don't know when you'll move next.
- Every single person you've had a relationship with was from a different country.
- You can recognize all sorts of languages even if you can't speak a damn word of any of them.
- On any particular day, you could list where each piece of your attire came from (the ring is from chile, these leggins from spain, that shirt from the usa, and the sweater from costa rica, etc.).
-"Settling down" is a phrase that has no place in your vocabulary.
- You can't remember the first time you flew.
- People look at you weird because your skin color/hair color/dress doesn't fit the stereotype they have of wherever you happen to be from.
- You don't realize how much of a snob you are about everything because you've had better
- You speak multiple languages at home
- You can speak confidently on world politics
- You keep up with news about every country you've lived in
- You own a passport, or you own more than one passport, or you own a foreign passport.
- You know what TCK means.
- You know what expat means.
- Your yearbook had more than one language in it!
- You keep having to explain to everyone why you speak English, even though you grew up elsewhere.
- You are tired of people asking - "Where IS that?"
- You speak with authority on the quality of airline travel.
- You get homesick for a place that isn't 'home'.
- You have no idea where home is anyway.
- You feel like a local in 3 or more places, you can give directions to foreigners in 3 or more big cities, and you know what the hottest clubs are in Paris, Stocklholm, and Mombasa.
- Finding high school friends on facebook almost makes you cry!
- You can recognize at least four countries by their country code (81 = japan etc.
- You're not American, but people conclude you are because of the transatlantic accent
- The more you drink, the more American your accent sounds
- You've been forced to stay with some random family for a cultural exchange 2000 km from home
- More than half your network on Facebook is on the other side of the world and you'll most probably never see them for years, yet these are some of the friends closest to your heart
- You live in a parallel world to the locals around you
- You're so used to misunderstanding people that you automatically pretend to understand when you really don't understand
- You never feel like a tourist, but you also never feel particularly "at home", whatever that means, or where ever that is
- Most of your relationships have ended because of international relocation and distance
- One of your pets has an international bloodline, often coming directly from a country you have never visited
- Not only do you have friends from all over the world, but when you do talk about your international friends, you ALWAYS say "so my friend <NAME>" followed by "you know, the one from <COUNTRY>".

How pathetic can you get?

I have an ex I'm very fond of. We got together back in high school in Kathmandu and broke up some time after it, but more because the relationship just died a natural death and there really wasn't any point continuing it. No dramas, no scenes; just a see you later, take care of yourself and hey, keep in touch. I was about 19 back then. Over the years, we've seen each other through various relationships, mistakes, breakups, fallings out, disasters and ultimately each of our 'holy shit I think this is it' moments.

I have and have had similar relationships with what I now realize is a fairly large number of men. To be clear, I never dated any of them, but I absolutely adore them because they're all some combination of intelligent, creative, funny, sweet, talented, silly, downright weird (on occasion), gorgeous (in the 'I have my shit together' sort of way), great to talk to, supportive, generous, well-read, able to listen, interested in things I find interesting (animals, cars, motorbikes, books, music, politics, history, physics, whatever), well-travelled, kind, honest, inventive, original and so on. In short, they're people. Real, functioning, thinking human beings around whom I feel challenged, switched on, comfortable, safe and happy.

I'm all for the whole imprinting on one's parents thing because my relationship with them is basically a repeat and expansion of my relationship with my father (and arguably all of that formed a blueprint for my relationship with Ameel). It's always a bit silly to say 'if not for X, such and such wouldn't have happened' becuause X was there and whatever it is did happen and you have no real way of knowing whether your statement is true. But, coming from a relatively 'conservative' nation (for lack of a better word - I wasn't born in Pakistan and spent more time outside the country than in it, so I feel that, if anything my passport makes me from Pakistan-the-idea rather than Pakistan-the-place), I lucked out. I'd always thought so, because bad fathers are an unfortunately world-wide phenomenon, but I realized just how much when I went back to Lahore for college and discovered the utter monsters that are allowed to raise children there. Some had attitudes similar to those of my father (after all, he's from there too), but what the apparent majority of men(with the collusion of their wives and families) put their children - particularly their daughters - through was appalling.

With some notable exceptions, the men my own age that I met there were just as appalling. (So, too, again with some exceptions, were the women, so ultimately I guess they pretty much deserved each other.)  I made an effort. I really did. But seriously, if a man's fool enough to pull the macho crap and try to tell me what to do...

But that's just it. They really, honestly don't seem to know any better. The few that tried it with me probably still don't know where they went wrong (or what hit them), and I doubt that they really have any need to seeing as how they're probably now with women who do the whole subservient little woman thing anyway. And everyone involved is probably quite happy with things too, which I suppose is fine. Just because it's not my thing doesn't make it automatically' bad'.

But what does make it bad is when this crap spills over into my life. The web makes it possible for me to reconnect with all the wonderful people I've had to leave behind because our lives went in different directions. I've found people I haven't seen or been in touch with for ten years or more through things like Facebook and Orkut and have, thanks to them, actually managed to stay in touch with people. They're good applications, specially for us wanderers, because they bring all our different worlds into one easy to manage space. It's more of a home than any real place I can think of because everyone from evereywhere is there. Virtually.

Along with all of that, unfortunately, comes the aforementioned crap. Because my network or nationality or name or friends or some combination of these usually place me within reach of the 'desi' presence on the web, I am occasionally pestered by men seeking to be 'friends'. Now in desi-speak, 'friends' (or 'frraands' as it is generally pronounced) does not mean friends who chat once in a while, perhaps even over coffee or drinks, or friends who know each other a bit better and are interested in each other's lives, generally helpful and kind, and mostly truthful except perhaps when concerning an unfortunate haircut, etc. A 'friend' request from a desi man to a woman he does not know means simply that he thinks she's hot and that he has a chance of getting into her pants (virtually or otherwise) for some reason, be it that he thinks she's 'western(ized)' and therefore a 'slut' (read: a woman who has clapped eyes on a man not of her family oh, maybe once?), stupid enough to fall for his 'friend' routine, or so starved for attention that she will immediately fall to her knees in gratitude. Need I mention that these men are quite often also delusional?

Unfortunately, they obviously have some measure of success because they just don't go away.

When faced with a 'no thanks', they first begin to pepper you with messages asking you why not. When you don't respond, they beg for reasons why their oh so manly manliness hasn't had it's 'normal' effect (excuse me while I snort). When they still get nothing ( I don't believe in feeding the animals at a zoo either) they go and steal pictures they find of you on the web, put them in their own photo albums on said networking site, usually with some kind of inane caption, and then leave you a link to it. Now, this generally does get a lot of (desi) girls to contact them, if only to ask them to remove the picture because they're usually compromising (sometimes the mere fact that a perfectly innocent picture is in the possession of a 'stranger' is enough to get them into a world of trouble). This generally gives the harasser a 'way in': he's achieved his objective of getting a reaction and can now blackmail the girls into further contact, whether on the 'net or, more dangerously, in real life.

The problem that these shits run into with me is that I'm not too fond of being harassed or blackmailed and I'm not one to run from a fight if provoked. I'm also not liable to stop till I've ground them into a pulp. This is why I generally stay away from physical fights. I don't need the lawsuits or the possible jailtime, thank you. But in the virtual world, you can kick someone's ass from here to next Tuesday quite nicely, and all without getting your hands too dirty.

So when this particular idiot took a picture of me off this site and did the usual (on Orkut, this was), he didn't get the expected hysterical messages. Instead, Ameel and I

  1. put all the messages I had from him up on my Orkut page,

  2. messaged my friends about his harassment, pointing out the stupidity of 'stealing' a picture that is already in the public domain (under a creative commons copyright),

  3. asked them to check out his nauseatingly pedestrian profile, his visible harassment of other women on Orkut (scrapbooks are publicly viewable), his messages to me, and then

  4. invited them to come express their opinion of him on my page.


It was hilarious to see him scampering to delete his trail and remove most of the pictures from his album, all the while leaving idiotic messages in his defense. The last was the usual 'I just wanted what was best for you and promise me you'll be happy always and I would have been a true and devoted friend'. When that got nothing but jeers (Thanks, mate, but I already have all the dogs I want.), we were all told that this person had had a terrible accident and was in intensive care and that we should all be ashamed of ourselves for being such meanies. When that didn't get a reaction, we received another message saying that he had died and asking if we were happy now. From his account. A 'friend' of his logged in for him you see, because obviously the first thing you do when a friend is dying in hospital is log into his Orkut account and inform all the people there who have expressed overt dislike for him that someone they don't give two shits about has had a completely random accident, most likely caused by the stupidity he so blatantly exhibited online. Naturally.

If any such thing happened at all. Since I've had similar crap pulled on me before (I know. But I didn't fall for it then either.) I knew not to take it seriously. Sure enough, a while later a person with the same name starts commenting on this blog. Nothing untoward was said, so I didn't react. Then someone, again using the same name, sends me a friend request on Facebook. Now, I like Facebook because you can ignore requests and keep these people out of your circle and therefore unable to harass you (other than by private message, and that's a bit of a bother to do. You have to, like, articulate and stuff.)

All was well until lo, one day I get a friend request from a Nadia Niaz whose profile has a picture of me (again from my website, and this time from Ameel's photo page) on it. Another friend had also received a request and was wondering if it was some kook. So I reported it. Obviously. And so did a number of other people. Facebook removed the account. Bye bye, troll.

Or so we thought. Now there's a Nadia Niaz on Orkut whose profile picture is the same picture this loser first took off my site (and which I was using on Facebook for a while). Oh and get this, this Nadia is also 28, is single, and is only interested in women because she has had 'bad experiences' with men in the past. I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I think I'm meant to be offended or something. I mean, my goodness, a lesbian. How very original. Hands up the women who've been called dykes by men they weren't interested in? I think it's even funnier because, really, I have no issues being called a lesbian. I think women are lovely. The person I ended up committing to happens to have been born male, but it really wouldn't have made much of a difference to me personally either way. So umm, no, sexuality's not really an issue kiddo.

What I would find fascinating, if I could be bothered to investigate this phenomenon more, is why these people don't give up. It's not just on the 'net that this happens. While in Pakistan, pretty much the moment I got a cell phone was when I started getting random phone calls from people who wanted to 'get to know' me. How do these people have the time? Are they really all at that loose an end? No wonder the country's going to shit. And really, how pathetic and frustrated do you have to be to do this ad nauseam? Eventually, I wouldn't bother hanging up. I'd put the moron on hold and let him talk. (They always want to talk - one of the made up this very entertaining story about why I wouldn't speak. He probably wouldn't have figured out he was on speakerphone addressing not just me but my husband and a few friends as well if someone in the background hadn't burst out laughing.)

It comes across as cruel at times, I realize. But I've tried being nice, and I've tried reason, neither of which I think they're entitled to. I've also tried ignoring them. And yet he/they seem to think their lives are some shitty bollywood movie where the hero (them, of course) must pursue the heroine (whatever woman they're fixated on) even though she claims to not be interested in him because, of course, she either is secretly mad for him and is simply too dishonest to admit it, or is just too stupid to realize how great a catch he is and so must be repeatedly dazzled with his...er....well...nothing much really...but...it's just....well...he's male dammit and he wants her so how dare the impudent female say no? That's not what happens in the movies! And movies, specially big bollywood productions, are absolutely realistic. Oh yes they are!

Morons.

Anyway, I've reported the creep again. Let's see how we go. Orkut is apparently less stringent about such things, but then most of my friends have migrated to Facebook already, because it affords one more, obviously much needed, privacy from such fuckwits.

Levitation

The Telegraph recently carried a story about levitation and how it could be used to help nanotechnologists keep "tiny objects from sticking to each other." It can do this by reversing the Casimir force, which causes things to be drawn together in the first place. In theory, this could be used to levitate whole humans and, more importantly, move large objects.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.


The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.


Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.



For more on the Casimir effect and the Casimir force, see The Casimir Effect: A Force from Nothing. For more on this story, see Perfect Lens Could Reverse Casimir Effect.