Motherhood in 2:55
I saw this on Good Morning America, and then my oldest, dearest friend sent me the same in an e-mail. Motherhood condensed into 2 minutes and 55 seconds. Very original.
Every time I listened to it I understood it better! Adventure Man is rolling on the floor!
QC Helps with the Cleaning
I am working back in the project room, which is also the guest room, trying to get it all cleaned out for guests arriving soon. It is a major task. When I am working, things can get pretty chaotic. The room gets vacuumed and dusted regularly, but, in truth, it isn’t easy to dust when all the sufaces are covered with items I might use.
And when cleaning up, things really need to be put back in the right place (or I will never see them again!) and sorted so I know what I have to work with.
Thank God I have the Qatteri Cat to help me out:
Qatteri Cat Goes Walking
This is for Maria. No, we are not related, except we are sort of three degrees-of-connection connected. I find her blog so unique and fun to read, AND she loves the Qatteri Cat and asked for more photos.
Most of the time, he sleeps, but because I had just opened a can of tuna, I caught him walking.
Rock Star Parking
Ya’ll know that a lot of this blog is about cross-cultural experiences, but this one is cross-cultural in our own family.
You know, every family, every tribe of us, has its own rituals and ways of doing things, and even when you marry someone you think you know very very well, you are in for some surprises.
One of the surprises in our marriage was that my husband thought I was supposed to fill the gas tank. Hello? Fill the gas tank? That’s MENS stuff, don’t you know? We had some tense moments in our first couple months of marriage working that one out, especially when I would leave him with nearly empty gas tank. My husband was rightfully flummoxed by my ability to be both a feminist and a princess, thinking that filling the tank and fixing car problems was HIS work. I learned *huge sigh* to watch the level of gas, to fill the tank, and to take the car in for services. *another big sigh*
But one thing that drove my husband right up the wall was my thing about parking close to the door. Well, I will give him this, he did not grow up in Alaska or in Seattle, he doesn’t know about freezing cold winds and mounds of snow and driving rain and winds that turn umbrellas inside out. My husband didn’t know that husbands, like daddies, are supposed to find the perfect spot as close to the entry as possible, every single time, or to drop us off and meet us inside. No, given I was a feminist, he expected to just take any old spot and I would just walk with him to wherever we would go. We never got that one worked out.
Not until a couple years ago. I learned that my mistake was all in trying to explain the irrationality of family culture. I learned that it was all about marketing, about positioning, something that normally I am very sensitive to and very good at doing. I was hopelessly blind in my approach and hopelessly single tracked.
It all changed when we were taking a new employee on a sight seeing tour of Kuwait. When we got to the grocery store, suddenly a spot opened up right in front of the store.
“Wooooo Hoooooo!” hooted the new guy, “ROCK STAR PARKING!”
I could see my husband straighten up and preen a little as he thought of himself as a person who got “rock star parking.” The light went on. Once he started thinking of himself as a “rock star parking” kind of guy, I never had to walk a long distance to the entry again.
(Woooo HOOOOOOOOO!)
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Once I picked up Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, I barely put it down again until I was finished. I found myself thoroughly involved in the lives of Mariam and Leila, unwilling even to stop to fix dinner! The author of Kiterunner has hit another home run.
There was a time when we would listen to older state department types talk – with enormous longing – about their tours of duty in Afghanistan, pre-Soviet invasion, pre-Taliban, pre-American occupation. Have you ever read James Michener’s Caravan? There are two countries I long to vist, but the countries they are now are not the countries I heard people talk about – Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Our friends loved their times in these two countries.
A Thousand Splendid Suns opens in a small village outside Herat, and then takes us to Kabul. Mariam is born harami, a bastard, of a village cleaning woman in the house of a very wealthy man. Her father builds a small hut for her mother and herself in a remote part of the small village, and visits Mariam every week. Life is simple, and difficult, but also full of kind people who visit and who are concerned with Mariam’s welfare.
After marrying, Mariam goes to Kabul and learns a new way of life with her husband, Rasheed. What fascinates me with Hosseini is that while Rashid is one of the villians of this novel, he is just a man, doing the best he can given his own upbringing and limitations. In a sense, he is “everyman”, the strutting, domineering, sometimes brutal and abusive husband we find in every culture. But Hosseini also gives him transient bouts of kindness which blow through a little less often than the transient bouts of cruelty.
He also gives us good men, in this book, in the person of Jalil, the father of Mariam, who steps up to the plate in acknowledging Mariam and supporting her and her mother, but fails to nurture in the very real way women need nurturing from their fathers in order to reach their full potential in life. Hosseini also gives us a very strong man in the book, Tariq, who, although he has only one leg, is more wholly a man than any other man in the book. I imagine that this is not unintentional. (How Kissingerian is that for a double negative?!)
Written almost entirely in the Afghan world of women, we see through the eyes of Mariam, and later Leila, the transitions in Afghanistan and their impacts on daily life. We experience happiness with them, and peaceful scenes in quiet moments, raising the children, stepping outside into the garden at night to share a cup of tea and a shared bowl of halwa.
Between the moments of peacefulness, we also experience incoming morter rounds, explosions, marauding bands of warlords, and starvation. We go into a women’s hospital under Taliban control, where there are no medications, no running water, no instruments, and an Afghani female doctor does a C-section with no anaesthesia and is required to keep her burqa on. We watch a mother abandon her role and take to her bed when her two sons are killed fighting the Soviets, we experience betrayal and we experience helplessness, and we experience a Kabul women’s prison. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a rich feast of experiences, juxtaposing the everyday chores of women around the world – cooking, raising children, laundry – with events on the world stage.
(Available from Amazon for $14.27 plus shipping.)
OJ Simpson Charged Again
And speaking of idiots, if you’ve committed a double murder and gotten away with it, why would you be so arrogant as to keep having run-ins with the cops? No matter how good the lawyers are that you hire, one day your luck runs out. With all my heart, I am hoping that this is the day for OJ Simpson.
God willing, your criminal arrogance will trip you.
The following is from CNN News, where you can read the entire story.
LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) — Prosecutors on Tuesday filed numerous criminal charges against former NFL star O.J. Simpson and three other men in connection with an alleged armed robbery at a Las Vegas hotel last week.
The 11 charges include two counts of first-degree kidnapping with use of a deadly weapon; two counts of robbery with a deadly weapon; and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon.
Prosecutors say Simpson and his co-defendants — Walter Alexander, Clarence Stewart and Michael McClinton — committed kidnapping because they intended to hold or detain the two alleged victims using a weapon.
Peter Bowen: Wolf, No Wolf
“You have to take this. You’ll really like it,” Sparkle insisted as I inwardly groaned, thinking of the TWO stacks of unread-must-reads by the side of my bed, and my already bulging suitcases.
“I know it doesn’t sound like something you’ll like,” she went on, slightly frustrated with me, with herself, “but once you start reading, you’ll get into it.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but good enough for me. I always KNOW what I think she will love, and she has done me many a favor in return, introducing me to authors and series worth reading.
“It’s about Montana. The main character is mixed Indian and French and some other things, a grandfather, and it all takes place in a small town in Montana . . . ” she sort of fizzles out. “I’m really not doing a very good job of making this interesting.”
And she sighs in frustration.
So, about a month later, just because I love my sister, I pick the book up and start reading while waiting for my husband to get home for dinner. As it turns out, he is very very late – and I am very very glad. I don’t want to stop reading!
When you first jump into Wolf, No Wolf by Peter Bowen, it takes you a minute to adjust your ear to the way they talk. These aren’t people most of us have met before. Gabriel DuPre´ is m´etis, a mixed blood. His ancestors are French who came early to the great continent that is now the US, Canada and Mexico, and they trapped and hunted, married native American wives, and developed a culture all their own. His language pattern is similar to that of the Cajun in Louisiana.
He is a cattle brand inspector in this small Montana town. His children are grown, he has so many grandchildren he can’t remember all their names. Every now and then, he pins on his deputy sherrif badge to solve a mystery in the small town of Toussaint, Montana.
Here is how Wolf, No Wolf opens:
Du Pre´ fiddled in the Toussaint Bar. The place was packed. some of Madelaine’s relatives had come down from Canada to visit. It was fall and the bird hunters had come, to shoot partridges and grouse on the High Plains.
The bird hungers were pretty OK. The big game hunters were pigs, mostly. The bird hunters were outdoors people; they loved it and knew it, or wanted to. The big game hungers wanted to shoot at something big, often someone’s cows.
Bart had bought a couple thousand dollars’ worth of liquor and several kegs of beer and there was a lot of food people had brought. Everything was free.
Kids ran in and out. The older ones could have beers. Bart was tending bar. Old Booger Tom sat on one of the high stools, cane leaned up against the front of the bar.
“You do that pretty good for someone the booze damn near killed,” said Booger Tom. “I know folks won’t be in the same room with the stuff.”
“Find Jesus,” said Bart. “It’s not too late to save your life.”
He went down to the far end of the bar and took orders. Susan Klein, who owned the saloon, was washing glasses at a great pace.
One of Madelaine’s relatives was playing the accordion, another an electric guitar. They were very good.
Du Pre´ finished. He was wet with sweat. The place was hot and damp and smoky, so smoky it was hard to see across the room. The room wasn’t all that big, either.
Madelaine got up from her seat, her pretty face flushed from drinking the sweet pink wine she loved. She threw her arms around Du Pre´ and kissed him for a long time.
“Du Pre´,” she said, “you make me ver’ happy, you play those good songs.”
. . …
Someday this fine woman marry me, thought Du Pre´, soon as the damn Catholic church, it tell her OK, your missing husband is dead now so you can quit sinning, fornicating with DuPre´.
I’ve never hung out in a bar in Montana, fiddled, or had a girlfriend named Madeleine (!), but already I feel like I know these people and this life. Peter Bowen is the Donna Leon of Montana, introducing us to the kind of crimes that happen in those sleepy looking towns we drive past on the superhighways, glancing at, or stopping to fill our gas tanks.
DuPre´ is a good man, and, like many a good man, sometimes has to do a bad thing to protect those he is sworn to protect. Policing is not pretty business.
The first story has to do with the re-introduction of wolves back into the Montana highlands, something not at all popular with those who have been raising cattle there. The second book in this two-book collection has to do with serial killers, how they stay under the radar, and how very difficult it is to catch them.
In both books, it is as much about a new way of living and thinking as it is about solving the crime. DuPre´ consults often with his friend Benetsee, the local medicine man, who sees things we don’t see. One of the FBI Agents is Harvey Wallace, also more than half native American, whose real name is Harvey Weasel Fat. The books are about how men and women fight, the nature of male friendships and female friendships, and very much about the human condition wherever we may be.
Life is short. I can never live in all these places long enough to even scratch the surface of the flavor of each variety of life. But these books help, they give us glimpses into another way of thinking, another way of doing things, and stretches our little minds just a little so that we learn to think more flexibly.
So who is going to write the Kuwait detective series? Who will take us into the diwaniyyas seeking information, who will take us out on the shoowi to gather information against those delivering drugs to Kuwait, with whom will we camp in the desert, avoiding explosives left over from the Iraqi invasion? I think his name is Anwar al Kout (the light of Kuwait!) and his wife is Suhail (the Yemeni Star!) – somewhere out there is someone who can take us into Kuwait and bring it alive. Where are you?
(You were right, Sparkle. I loved it!)
Wooo Hooooo Doctor Diamond!
I am bursting with pride. And she’s not MY daughter, I have nothing to do with her success, she’s done this all on her own. My niece, Little Diamond is now DOCTOR DIAMOND!
I don’t imagine I will remember to think of her as Doctor Diamond all the time; I will probably still call her Little Diamond.
Little Diamond, Doctor Diamond, we are all so proud of you. We dance of joy at your accomplishment, and your determination, and how very very GOOD you are! Wooo Hooooooooo!
So here is something very cool. There is a Wikipedia article that tells you all about academic dress for different levels of educational attainment. In the olden days, and at a very few universities today, gowns (like robes, kind of like abyaa3t) are worn to classes. With each level you attain – Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, Doctorate – you get to wear different additions – capes, hoods, etc.
Most of the time you never get a chance to wear them again after graduation. Unless you are an academic, and then you wear them for every university graduation. It is particularly colorful when all the professors troop in, very medieval, wearing their university colors and their degree colors (yes, those are different.)
Woooo Hooooo, Doctor Diamond, c’mon over here and we will have a robe made of silk with sparkles on it! Adventure Man asks if we get a family discount for consultations?
Corporate Dancing
Maria, at A Time to Dance writes a lyrical and insightful comparison of Salsa dancing and the subtleties of corporate leadership – and followership. In a very original and poignant article, Maria juxtaposes her subjects with deft elegance.
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