This is the way I live.

you know why time moves so strangely in japan, like so fast, and so slow, is because i can't read anything on the streets. it's all kanji symbols and katakana and slashes and dots, and so it's like i live on a sim city grid, and it's amazing and it's like a gift, as if time isn't happening for me this year....or rather, it's as if time is finally functioning as i need it to....without me in it.

it takes me two hours at the grocery store in the tomato aisle, thinking, today do i buy local or do i buy organic--organic: they say they don't use pesticides, but the trucks that transported them here caused enough air pollution to make bad their organic promise. BAM. do i choose water pollution or air pollution today, plus local farmers tend to have higher attention to social consciousness, so do i support them even if they used some OFF on the vines this year? Or should I just pick the tomatoes with the least packaging, because styrofoam is disasterous and embarassing to use....
but here it takes me a bewildered 30 seconds--to pick some tomatoes that are less than 100 yen and are probably genetically modified as is the japanese fashion--incessant genetic modification; everything modification.

it's not a good way to live, it's not the way i want to live, guessing, living, being, chillin. but it's a break, and i need it, and I'm grateful to pollute and be wasteful and a non-functioning slob of an idealist that lost her way.

it's like a day trip, this year. wholly intended to have no purpose, other than to fertilize the seed of the other side of this day.

and while I'm here, I'm learning how to buy tupperware and keep paper in folders, and have cool pencil cases and highlighters that erase, and manage a phone bill, and to buy too many shoes and talk less, and sing more, and more badly, and be at work 15 minutes early, and wear a white collar for a little while. those aren't the most important things I'm learning....I guess that would be learning how to live quietly, silently even, conversing constantly and amiably with myself. In short, my lack of input in this kanji world of rose blush and digitally magnified eyeballs makes for an exotic and revolutionary output in myself that is teaching me to breath and make decisions, and THAT is the most important thing I am learning in Japan. It's the land of not making decisions, of not having an opinion, and of not foresaking thy families or the clock.

And for me, someone living in the bloodied shadow of contrition, I am thankful to learn the little Japanese things, like a love for compartmentalization and efficiency.

And I shall be the most organized sociopath in the whole world, am I right, Maggie? :) Che started off in medical school. Malcolm X worked in an ice cream shop in Harlem. And even Chelsea Handler was a virgin once.

With much love and attention,
This is the way I live,

what and when will be my motorcycle diaries?

today i watched the motorcycle diaries, not indie, i know, but all the same, i quietly wept in my bed (my futon) for a people of chile that were thrown out landless into desperate means and baseless lives on which to feed their children in the 60's.
i then thought about, and wept more, quietly, about a people in afghanistan numbed by bombs and then i realized i was really weeping that im not seeing and meeting them, but instead, a muted and bored civilization alienated by their island life.





so you see, im weeping for me, that i am not there but here and as always, the tragedy is lost on a girl whose biggest luxury is reckless travel.

"how is it I feel nostalgia for a world I never knew"

Japaneazy queezy!

Moved from Senegal to Champaign to Chicago to Japan since I've last blogged. Expect more ideas from Suwa-shi coming up!

Serena Williams; Black Venus

Check out some of these comments I found beneath the video:

That's fucking rank

disgusting. she looks like a fucking ape.

and

thats nasty....on so many levels...

They are just a few of the startlingly abrasive and relatively anonymous sound-bites we get from the youtube-viewing community, which, among others, includes us.

Hall is correct in naming it the "Spectacle" of the Other because exactly what we can see is a showy demonstration of revulsion (or) hate (or) antagonism which implicates a sense of separation, distance and a violent attempt at distinction.

Hall asks why “difference is so compelling a theme, so contested, an area of representation”—but difference is of course a necessitated result of representation. And I just want to call out some of these overconfident and out-of-line commentators. The act of representation is identifying that which is outside of oneself. But marking something as different, exotic, strange or distinctive is actually a reaction to a thing’s comparability—to oneself! One doesn’t need to differentiate a table from oneself; a table doesn’t have the same shape that I do, nor does it communicate to other tables in the way that I communicate to other humans. I can’t draw parallels between the table’s urban and rural communities in the way I do for my own. Tables don’t walk, they don’t talk, and I can reasonably wait for a distant point in the future for the day that I may be suspicious of the table, itself, marking these same differences between us.

But as much as I insist I don’t look Chinese or Jamaican or even “American”, there is enough of myself that I see in the strange and separate “other” that I must mark it, forcibly, intentionally, and in some cases as we see, violently, as “different”.

So you, you-tube subscriber, that insists on the nastiness of this crazy black lady as someone that, presumably, lacks nastiness.....I suggest a moment's reflection on how quickly you've turned off those who will automatically assume your complete idiocy, even if, for them, they are doing so from a "completely different" and maybe even pretentious elevated level of scholastic open-mindedness. :)

Lots of questions about my future, now. About whether I want to spend it in West Africa, where I feel that my strengths are highly complimented within this culture of necessitated charm and talk. Or whether my interests take me to Iran, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan. To Arabic and Farsi and the middle east, and the Taliban and guns and women in burkhas....I'd miss the food here. That's for sure. Replacing yassa with falafel would only make me sad, but wouldn't it be something else, to live in Tehran.....I'd eat falafel to live in that citadel of paradox.
But let's not forget that I might just get this one chance to visit Paris, turning it down seems traditional, backwards, dependent and wasteful. But maybe my default can't just be "travel and move when possible" which I adore for its simplicity. What my default CAN be, i don't know. Which I suppose means that there could also be a life sans default, which scares me, cause mostly I don't think I know enough about what I want and need to make decisions....save that I want to protect myself from failure. And that failure includes regret--it's too bad I don't know what I regret these days. It was easier, not having any friends...the junior high life. Now, wanting to do good by many people, shit's complicated, and I don't know What to think.

caste

la logique du caste, le stratification social.
everyone has a supreme power, like blacksmiths can use fire, or griots can sing praises of entire families, so they must necessarily be brought to a lower caste to be controlled, for the good of the community!

Ah! OK! We do it like this.

A truly Senegalese maxim, we do it like this stands for so much more than the taranga ji (hospitality) billowing so freely about the country like a strip of wind battered heavy duty damask cloth, battering us oh so sweetly at every senegalese moment....it's sort of how everyone, senegalese or martian has to function here in Senegal. With some flexibility, mindful of blacouts (coupe de courrants) and floods and malaria and other inconveniences that might cause a trafic jam or a late blog entry.....a really tardy blog, maybe two-months out of date type-blog.

My two months have so fare been marked with amour for my friends Senegalese and American, my glorious professors, for Waly, for yassa, for everything but my sweat, which plagues me every day under the hot hot heat.

But as the saying goes, ndank-ndank....if you continue to try, you will one day catch the monkey in the countryside.....roughly translating to sometimes shit just doesn't happen very fast!

More to come, and as always, love,


Olivia