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29 November 2006 : warm heart, cold hands.
this is maybe the best offer i've ever recieved, in regard to anything:
Lindsay. Come to AZ with me. I know you can go to school free other places but I think that is just shit and doesn't matter because I'm not in those other places and I desperately need your presence. We could find lots of Indians and Mexican immigrants and refugees and give them all our possessions and support and we could live off of cacti nutrients and knit clothing with the needles from the cacti and maybe we could see some of those rolly things that always bounce between two people having a shoot-out in Western movies. Think about it. Picture it. Us, slow motion, walking through Phoenix....tumbleweeds blowing all over. An image I HARDLY think anyone could resist. Fuck, woman. I'm begging you to come with me. I love you and need you. Come on. Who else could give such a damn good argument?
going to australia? one of the best decisions i ever made. there are so many people in this world i want to keep; i'm glad you're one of those who wants to keep me back.
posted by lindsay at 09:58 :: 2 comments
21 August 2006 : the imagined hazard of watching; part 2 of 6
she was not a young woman, but she carried the baby on her hip as though it belonged to her. she carried the baby on her hip as though it had once lived and fed among the soft pink tissues of her body. i studied it as well as i could from this distance, wrapped in a blue cloth whose intensity fought for dominance with the sky, and wondered if she lived well inside of it, or if it were a losing battle against time. the details were fuzzy at this distance, but age - hers and the baby's - she carried well.
i smiled at her furtive, quizzical glances from where i sat in a soft scrabble of sand, holding my book and sipping precious bottled water too warm for home but delicious in the necessity created by the incessant heat of being here. my feet would dangle of the edge of the cliff, too far from the ocean to feel its spray, for several hours but she would never respond to my advances.
it could have been my skin, so white in the light of day except where it was burnt pink from the same. or it could have been my clothes, shabby and secondhand though they were, bursting with songs about the world i came from which we both knew was about as far from hers as intangible distance allows. my tshirt with its holes and my jeans with their frayed seams were still different, nicer somehow, than anything she could have laid hands on. i doubted she would want to, envying the way the wind ruffled up underneath her skirts and must even as i watched be laying soft hands against the smooth skin of her thighs.
maybe it was the men nearby.
her men, they had to be. men rough and drunken and possibly disapproving of any contact with me. i watched disappointed but never found the courage to stand and bridge the gap between where i sat with one foot looped in my bag strap for safety and the child beat awkward searching hands against the sand. the men - long grass, they would be called - were behind us several hundred yards in the shade of a picnic shelter but their presence, like i'd come to realize about most strange men, was electrifying in its pervasion.
i sat in my disappointment for what felt like hours, craving the feeling of that little girl's eyes on me, the smooth skin as yet unscarred by whatever hard work her life would be. plane rides and gambling, relinquished paychecks, liquor, petrol, the racism she would take for granted by grace of birth. i wanted that baby, wanted to taste her as pure and undiluted, another young possiblity. she could be one who broke the endless cycle of heartbreak, of thievery, of disuse. she could sweep into the streets the dust of empty, disheveled lives.
it was my own heart that was breaking, that day i sat reading on the cliff. where the trees failed to shade me, the sun beat against my back and my legs. i was acutely aware of these things: the crease between thigh and buttock, the bend of a knee, a downed upper lip, the bridge of my nose. cool points to take pleasure in against the heat of my body.
i watched hungrily the woman and the baby without ever swallowing what it was that held me back, two decades of my mother's voice in my ear, telling me never to talk to strangers, her fear when i told her i would span continents alone. the woman and her baby were safe enough, she would suppose, but what about the men?
what about them? did i fear their distinct foreignness, or that they were clearly intoxicated on an early sunday afternoon? why could i not leave my book behind and lay a hand on that little girl's brow? i would never know, because i would never try. the woman continued to glance back at me, but i returned to my book and hoped for the best of possible futures for all of them. my work was to study, not interfere. the trials of an anthropologist in training. somewhere compassion ends and observation begins. my guess is that i could find some etymological link between emperical and imperial, and it would allow for night after sleepless night.
behind us a man walked barefoot in a purple tshirt that hurt my eyes in the contrast to his skin, burnished to the bare shine of a roasted coffee bean. he wandered through the park a little dumbfounded, cupped hands held to his mouth as he shouted the inexplicable, "sean connery!" over and over again. his accent was so thick, so broad that i felt it slide down the back of my throat and thought i would never be able to stretch open my white-girl jaws to accomodate it. i would be forever meek.
i felt nothing but self loathing as i wrapped my foot more tightly in the strap of my bag and turned back to an afternoon of dispassionate reading, black words on a white page describing the plight of the people whose true stories walked all around me.
posted by lindsay at 22:58 :: 0 comments
29 June 2006 : linked.
so much has happened in the last eight weeks to change my perspective on what amounts to - everything. a quiet newborn baby made me cry hidden tears, remembering how joyful it is just knowing that you are alive. a trip to australia made me question the strength of my convictions, my understanding of natural selection, and fall in love with some pretty amazing people. an evening with a taciturn, sunburnt cowboy clued me in about my own sense of sexuality and loaded me down with questions about who i am and what i truly want. an afternoon spent climbing over rocks and the bones of someone else's ancestors reminded me that the sun rises and sets everywhere just the same, and i should consider myself lucky to be counted among those who have seen it.
most elemental is that i finally remembered what that feeling is, that indistinct breathless feeling that comes over me for a time nearly every day. i am grateful to be alive and living. i catch my breath because i realize at the end of the day, i have two working feet and a heart that keeps beating, and no one has the right to ask for more.
what remains after all this goodness is the pervasive sense of moving on that has smothered this life like an extra blanket. i am aware that this chapter is coming to a close. i have, honestly, things to which i am looking eagerly forward - my thesis work, graduation, a career. and things to dread, like leaving this place and these people around whom this life is built. necessity i understand. goodbye i do not. and i can feel it coming. i hope its another mistaken assumption.
so i work, and i wait. i worry about money and avoid the basement, i wear my routines like a cloak that protects me from the cold wind of uncertainty.
and i let every moment be, without rush or force. smoke a cigarette to calm me and feel the assurance of my own smooth skin covering my own strong bones that are held together with tough flesh.
flesh that wears, but never tears.
posted by lindsay at 23:18 :: 0 comments
19 June 2006 : beyond far.
how can a life be explained?
a man is sitting across the table from a girl and he wants to know what she does. he has no basis for comparison and will only know her for a few hours total.
its hard anyway, for her to concentrate on anything but the scar across his cheek and the way he keeps looking at her every time he stands up to get a beer.
she tries, knowing he will not understand - he has told her about sweeping desert plains, cattle ranches, truck stops and unfathomable animals and sand in his teeth. this she understands in a plaintive longing sort of way - she's wanted that life more than once, wanted the sunburnt muscle ache blinding white of it. but this is what she has struggled with for the last however long of her life - what it means, how it reeks of complacency and entitlement, unearned privilege and laziness.
she stumbles, the words tumbling out too quickly and in improper order - it is not the alcohol (she could handle twice as much without blinking) but from the shock of discovering her inability to describe.
that life is so graceful. so elegantly simple. how could she tell him that hers exceeds the rest for reasons like these: the blue tint of the air outside the front porch in the early morning, the mingled taste of white wine and laughter, the complete confidence in those people who surround her, the sound of her own voice over a microphone.
i play tennis sometimes, she tells him hesitantly and he chuckles, lighting a cigarette. take the dog for walks, watch television. he expects more; to him she looks new and exotic and she has to do more than this. but its the background that matters, the soundtrack. the tinkling of windchimes and the howling of wind against window in the dark of early morning.
is that it? she holds his gaze steady as he waits for an answer, but all she can do is put her chin on her hand, her elbow on the table. when he smiles, the light catches that scar on his face and makes it glow.
finally she shrugs, she says, i live with my friends. they're around all the time. i spend hours at school and at work and then i come home and every moment is exciting, even though we don't do anything. we sit on the porch and drink coffee in the morning.
he finishes off his beer and she has nothing left to say; they have so little in common. if he kisses her, though, he'll probably be able to taste - just a bit - that grace and that elegance, the feeling of weathered wood floors under bare feet.
he never kisses her.
she's realized it doesn't matter.
posted by lindsay at 08:06 :: 2 comments
31 May 2006 : inanities
i am in canberra and the lucksmiths are nowhere to be found.
it hurts my heart a little.
we drove over the great dividing range on sunday and it felt like being infinite; for a moment i was convinced that nothing was insurmountable.
no dice, though.
i got hit on by two thirteen year old boys today.
posted by lindsay at 01:23 :: 2 comments
29 May 2006 : fair bloody dinkum.
i have yet to find any sense of cohesion or consensus here. australia has been a flood of vivid colors and aching, moments stretched out over unknown periods of time. cigarettes cost anywhere from 8.50 to 11.90 a pack, and i forgot to break in my shoes. but i haven't figured out what i am doing here or how i am working right now, other than following the pack from behind (and getting annoyed when someone interrupts my lagging by asking if i am okay). we are a dynamic bunch - most mornings we wake up sore in face and abdomen from laughing. everything here has a punchline.
sydney was not my favorite place - beautiful, yes, but those cities are no longer for me. too many people, too many choices, too little conversation. i walk too slowly for such a city. but we have found canberra recently, a city that i want to lick and stick to the back of my notebook like an exotic stamp. today, black swans with red beaks and white cockatoos, and a museum exhibit called cirque - all video displays and moving chairs, so beautiful it made my teeth hurt.
we chose the right time, i think, to be here - it's fall in canberra (-4 celsius when we left for city center this morning) and the foliage is a sight to behold. beyond that, both the film festival and the annual writers festival spanned our time in sydney and i found myself pushing harder than i thought possible to find a space in every thing i could. i missed frank moorhouse and clive hamilton, naomi wolf and maya angelou.
but the highlight of sydney, i think, was probably the panel of indigenous writers at the writers festival, to which i followed ian (up up up uphill) on a whim - it gets dark around 5pm and i was frozen to my toes, but went anyway for the chance to hear what they had to say. joseph boyden (canada), tara june winch (australia), alootook ipellie (baffin island), and sherman alexie. my heart sputtered with their words, some so powerful that you had to look away from them - alootook ipellie read a poem about the most unimaginably destructive force that the white men brought with them as they made their way onto baffin island, which was noise. the white man effectively ended nature's silence.
and sherman alexie, he stood up and made everyone gasp with laughter - the desperate kind because we were momentarily kindred and we all knew that to laugh at these situations was the only way to look past them. he was astonishing, all brash reality and calm truth, telling us about the death of his alcoholic father and his son playing gameboy in a windowseat over a stunning view of darling harbor ("portrait of oppressed indigenous youth").
truth be told, everything has been so tough, so rigorous, so painful thus far that i have little will to focus on academics. reality's not given up, and will continue nipping at my heels until i sit down with her, but for now it's early dinners with the rest of the group (dr. ian spaghetti mcintosh, who once defeated an attacking shark by snapping his fingers and making the ocean around them boil, presiding), and those tiny moments of breathtaking beauty.
we head to darwin on thursday and i can't say there's anything i've anticipated more - i'm tired of these cities and these endless skyscrapers against an unfathomably perfect (endless) blue sky.
posted by lindsay at 01:43 :: 2 comments
21 May 2006 : for to carry me home.
there are many, many things a girl must fit into her carryon when packing for a trip like the one i'm about to take. a few examples:
- insect repellent with 40% deet (because insect life in australia is large and aggressive)
- sunscreen spf 45 (because pink-cheeked white girls need help surviving the desert)
- a water bottle that holds 32 fluid ounces
- a couple of books for easy reading
- a list of postcard addressees (send me an email if you want one)
and about a million other things (about 100$ worth at your friendly local discount store, truth be told).
but what is truly elemental to the sucess of an outing such as this one is bravery - and that's something wal-mart can't squeeze out of a producer in south america for 2.98 a bottle.
in with the nervous making, because this is my first chance to dig my fingers in. this is my first chance to do ethnographic research, to put to use those things i've been learning with the purpose of dedicating the rest of my life to something. my first chance to make or break.
i could falter. i've been known to lose my words when i am put on the spot. any eloquence i may posess decides to take a personal day every time it's imperative i put it to use. people intimidate me if i want to impress them. i shake and my face burns, i have trouble breathing and i start saying "uhm," about every third word.
there's some major intimidation factor at work here, see. peter garrett, who we will meet with on our second day in country, already has me quaking in my rugged offroad trainers. How am I supposed to be hip, rock and roll, beautiful, confident, eloquent and brilliant all at the same time? most days i have the energy for about one of those things. Lunch with dr. peter read of australian national university? i have to do all those things and eat while i'm doing it!
beyond that, walking up to a stranger and introducing myself is something i've never done in the united states, let alone in a country where responses to my presence may include assumptions about fat, rich americans and their exaggerated sense of entitlement and presumption. color me excited (i am actually, just terrified at the same time).
and what's most important, really, is the idea that this is where i put my feet in the water and figure out if i've really got what it takes to dedicate myself to this work. the rest of my life is a very long time and academia is oh-so-fickle. perhaps i can't make the cut; maybe my insecurities will force me back to the shelter of a university where i will teach and publish and teach and publish and cry for boredom on my lunch hour every day.
then again, this entire entry is about me - and that atlas complex, well, it's got sharp fingernails and they've dug themselves deep into my palms. because if i really care to do something about anything, if i really want to make a difference to someone (anyone), if i really want to embrace this bleeding heart i've got fueling those warm-fuzzy feelings toward humanity as a whole, then i'll suck it the fuck up and do what has to be done. because it doesn't have anything to do with me. it has to do with other people - entire populations of them - who have no choice, no representation, no rights and no options.
that's why i think i'll succeed.
well. that, a bottle of red wine, a conversation with lisa, and my deeply rooted belief that i am better than everyone at everything and can do pretty much anything should i deign to give it a bit of effort.
my flight leaves at 6pm on monday. i'll be there with boots on.
posted by lindsay at 01:59 :: 3 comments
this is maybe the best offer i've ever recieved, in regard to anything:
Lindsay. Come to AZ with me. I know you can go to school free other places but I think that is just shit and doesn't matter because I'm not in those other places and I desperately need your presence. We could find lots of Indians and Mexican immigrants and refugees and give them all our possessions and support and we could live off of cacti nutrients and knit clothing with the needles from the cacti and maybe we could see some of those rolly things that always bounce between two people having a shoot-out in Western movies. Think about it. Picture it. Us, slow motion, walking through Phoenix....tumbleweeds blowing all over. An image I HARDLY think anyone could resist. Fuck, woman. I'm begging you to come with me. I love you and need you. Come on. Who else could give such a damn good argument?
going to australia? one of the best decisions i ever made. there are so many people in this world i want to keep; i'm glad you're one of those who wants to keep me back.
Labels: Australia, When I grow up
posted by lindsay at 09:58 :: 2 comments
21 August 2006 : the imagined hazard of watching; part 2 of 6
she was not a young woman, but she carried the baby on her hip as though it belonged to her. she carried the baby on her hip as though it had once lived and fed among the soft pink tissues of her body. i studied it as well as i could from this distance, wrapped in a blue cloth whose intensity fought for dominance with the sky, and wondered if she lived well inside of it, or if it were a losing battle against time. the details were fuzzy at this distance, but age - hers and the baby's - she carried well.
i smiled at her furtive, quizzical glances from where i sat in a soft scrabble of sand, holding my book and sipping precious bottled water too warm for home but delicious in the necessity created by the incessant heat of being here. my feet would dangle of the edge of the cliff, too far from the ocean to feel its spray, for several hours but she would never respond to my advances.
it could have been my skin, so white in the light of day except where it was burnt pink from the same. or it could have been my clothes, shabby and secondhand though they were, bursting with songs about the world i came from which we both knew was about as far from hers as intangible distance allows. my tshirt with its holes and my jeans with their frayed seams were still different, nicer somehow, than anything she could have laid hands on. i doubted she would want to, envying the way the wind ruffled up underneath her skirts and must even as i watched be laying soft hands against the smooth skin of her thighs.
maybe it was the men nearby.
her men, they had to be. men rough and drunken and possibly disapproving of any contact with me. i watched disappointed but never found the courage to stand and bridge the gap between where i sat with one foot looped in my bag strap for safety and the child beat awkward searching hands against the sand. the men - long grass, they would be called - were behind us several hundred yards in the shade of a picnic shelter but their presence, like i'd come to realize about most strange men, was electrifying in its pervasion.
i sat in my disappointment for what felt like hours, craving the feeling of that little girl's eyes on me, the smooth skin as yet unscarred by whatever hard work her life would be. plane rides and gambling, relinquished paychecks, liquor, petrol, the racism she would take for granted by grace of birth. i wanted that baby, wanted to taste her as pure and undiluted, another young possiblity. she could be one who broke the endless cycle of heartbreak, of thievery, of disuse. she could sweep into the streets the dust of empty, disheveled lives.
it was my own heart that was breaking, that day i sat reading on the cliff. where the trees failed to shade me, the sun beat against my back and my legs. i was acutely aware of these things: the crease between thigh and buttock, the bend of a knee, a downed upper lip, the bridge of my nose. cool points to take pleasure in against the heat of my body.
i watched hungrily the woman and the baby without ever swallowing what it was that held me back, two decades of my mother's voice in my ear, telling me never to talk to strangers, her fear when i told her i would span continents alone. the woman and her baby were safe enough, she would suppose, but what about the men?
what about them? did i fear their distinct foreignness, or that they were clearly intoxicated on an early sunday afternoon? why could i not leave my book behind and lay a hand on that little girl's brow? i would never know, because i would never try. the woman continued to glance back at me, but i returned to my book and hoped for the best of possible futures for all of them. my work was to study, not interfere. the trials of an anthropologist in training. somewhere compassion ends and observation begins. my guess is that i could find some etymological link between emperical and imperial, and it would allow for night after sleepless night.
behind us a man walked barefoot in a purple tshirt that hurt my eyes in the contrast to his skin, burnished to the bare shine of a roasted coffee bean. he wandered through the park a little dumbfounded, cupped hands held to his mouth as he shouted the inexplicable, "sean connery!" over and over again. his accent was so thick, so broad that i felt it slide down the back of my throat and thought i would never be able to stretch open my white-girl jaws to accomodate it. i would be forever meek.
i felt nothing but self loathing as i wrapped my foot more tightly in the strap of my bag and turned back to an afternoon of dispassionate reading, black words on a white page describing the plight of the people whose true stories walked all around me.
Labels: Australia, old chestnuts, pretentiously introspective: a series
posted by lindsay at 22:58 :: 0 comments
29 June 2006 : linked.
so much has happened in the last eight weeks to change my perspective on what amounts to - everything. a quiet newborn baby made me cry hidden tears, remembering how joyful it is just knowing that you are alive. a trip to australia made me question the strength of my convictions, my understanding of natural selection, and fall in love with some pretty amazing people. an evening with a taciturn, sunburnt cowboy clued me in about my own sense of sexuality and loaded me down with questions about who i am and what i truly want. an afternoon spent climbing over rocks and the bones of someone else's ancestors reminded me that the sun rises and sets everywhere just the same, and i should consider myself lucky to be counted among those who have seen it.
most elemental is that i finally remembered what that feeling is, that indistinct breathless feeling that comes over me for a time nearly every day. i am grateful to be alive and living. i catch my breath because i realize at the end of the day, i have two working feet and a heart that keeps beating, and no one has the right to ask for more.
what remains after all this goodness is the pervasive sense of moving on that has smothered this life like an extra blanket. i am aware that this chapter is coming to a close. i have, honestly, things to which i am looking eagerly forward - my thesis work, graduation, a career. and things to dread, like leaving this place and these people around whom this life is built. necessity i understand. goodbye i do not. and i can feel it coming. i hope its another mistaken assumption.
so i work, and i wait. i worry about money and avoid the basement, i wear my routines like a cloak that protects me from the cold wind of uncertainty.
and i let every moment be, without rush or force. smoke a cigarette to calm me and feel the assurance of my own smooth skin covering my own strong bones that are held together with tough flesh.
flesh that wears, but never tears.
Labels: Australia, Two steps forward
posted by lindsay at 23:18 :: 0 comments
19 June 2006 : beyond far.
how can a life be explained?
a man is sitting across the table from a girl and he wants to know what she does. he has no basis for comparison and will only know her for a few hours total.
its hard anyway, for her to concentrate on anything but the scar across his cheek and the way he keeps looking at her every time he stands up to get a beer.
she tries, knowing he will not understand - he has told her about sweeping desert plains, cattle ranches, truck stops and unfathomable animals and sand in his teeth. this she understands in a plaintive longing sort of way - she's wanted that life more than once, wanted the sunburnt muscle ache blinding white of it. but this is what she has struggled with for the last however long of her life - what it means, how it reeks of complacency and entitlement, unearned privilege and laziness.
she stumbles, the words tumbling out too quickly and in improper order - it is not the alcohol (she could handle twice as much without blinking) but from the shock of discovering her inability to describe.
that life is so graceful. so elegantly simple. how could she tell him that hers exceeds the rest for reasons like these: the blue tint of the air outside the front porch in the early morning, the mingled taste of white wine and laughter, the complete confidence in those people who surround her, the sound of her own voice over a microphone.
i play tennis sometimes, she tells him hesitantly and he chuckles, lighting a cigarette. take the dog for walks, watch television. he expects more; to him she looks new and exotic and she has to do more than this. but its the background that matters, the soundtrack. the tinkling of windchimes and the howling of wind against window in the dark of early morning.
is that it? she holds his gaze steady as he waits for an answer, but all she can do is put her chin on her hand, her elbow on the table. when he smiles, the light catches that scar on his face and makes it glow.
finally she shrugs, she says, i live with my friends. they're around all the time. i spend hours at school and at work and then i come home and every moment is exciting, even though we don't do anything. we sit on the porch and drink coffee in the morning.
he finishes off his beer and she has nothing left to say; they have so little in common. if he kisses her, though, he'll probably be able to taste - just a bit - that grace and that elegance, the feeling of weathered wood floors under bare feet.
he never kisses her.
she's realized it doesn't matter.
Labels: Australia
posted by lindsay at 08:06 :: 2 comments
31 May 2006 : inanities
i am in canberra and the lucksmiths are nowhere to be found.
it hurts my heart a little.
we drove over the great dividing range on sunday and it felt like being infinite; for a moment i was convinced that nothing was insurmountable.
no dice, though.
i got hit on by two thirteen year old boys today.
Labels: Australia
posted by lindsay at 01:23 :: 2 comments
29 May 2006 : fair bloody dinkum.
i have yet to find any sense of cohesion or consensus here. australia has been a flood of vivid colors and aching, moments stretched out over unknown periods of time. cigarettes cost anywhere from 8.50 to 11.90 a pack, and i forgot to break in my shoes. but i haven't figured out what i am doing here or how i am working right now, other than following the pack from behind (and getting annoyed when someone interrupts my lagging by asking if i am okay). we are a dynamic bunch - most mornings we wake up sore in face and abdomen from laughing. everything here has a punchline.
sydney was not my favorite place - beautiful, yes, but those cities are no longer for me. too many people, too many choices, too little conversation. i walk too slowly for such a city. but we have found canberra recently, a city that i want to lick and stick to the back of my notebook like an exotic stamp. today, black swans with red beaks and white cockatoos, and a museum exhibit called cirque - all video displays and moving chairs, so beautiful it made my teeth hurt.
we chose the right time, i think, to be here - it's fall in canberra (-4 celsius when we left for city center this morning) and the foliage is a sight to behold. beyond that, both the film festival and the annual writers festival spanned our time in sydney and i found myself pushing harder than i thought possible to find a space in every thing i could. i missed frank moorhouse and clive hamilton, naomi wolf and maya angelou.
but the highlight of sydney, i think, was probably the panel of indigenous writers at the writers festival, to which i followed ian (up up up uphill) on a whim - it gets dark around 5pm and i was frozen to my toes, but went anyway for the chance to hear what they had to say. joseph boyden (canada), tara june winch (australia), alootook ipellie (baffin island), and sherman alexie. my heart sputtered with their words, some so powerful that you had to look away from them - alootook ipellie read a poem about the most unimaginably destructive force that the white men brought with them as they made their way onto baffin island, which was noise. the white man effectively ended nature's silence.
and sherman alexie, he stood up and made everyone gasp with laughter - the desperate kind because we were momentarily kindred and we all knew that to laugh at these situations was the only way to look past them. he was astonishing, all brash reality and calm truth, telling us about the death of his alcoholic father and his son playing gameboy in a windowseat over a stunning view of darling harbor ("portrait of oppressed indigenous youth").
truth be told, everything has been so tough, so rigorous, so painful thus far that i have little will to focus on academics. reality's not given up, and will continue nipping at my heels until i sit down with her, but for now it's early dinners with the rest of the group (dr. ian spaghetti mcintosh, who once defeated an attacking shark by snapping his fingers and making the ocean around them boil, presiding), and those tiny moments of breathtaking beauty.
we head to darwin on thursday and i can't say there's anything i've anticipated more - i'm tired of these cities and these endless skyscrapers against an unfathomably perfect (endless) blue sky.
Labels: Australia
posted by lindsay at 01:43 :: 2 comments
21 May 2006 : for to carry me home.
there are many, many things a girl must fit into her carryon when packing for a trip like the one i'm about to take. a few examples:
- insect repellent with 40% deet (because insect life in australia is large and aggressive)
- sunscreen spf 45 (because pink-cheeked white girls need help surviving the desert)
- a water bottle that holds 32 fluid ounces
- a couple of books for easy reading
- a list of postcard addressees (send me an email if you want one)
and about a million other things (about 100$ worth at your friendly local discount store, truth be told).
but what is truly elemental to the sucess of an outing such as this one is bravery - and that's something wal-mart can't squeeze out of a producer in south america for 2.98 a bottle.
in with the nervous making, because this is my first chance to dig my fingers in. this is my first chance to do ethnographic research, to put to use those things i've been learning with the purpose of dedicating the rest of my life to something. my first chance to make or break.
i could falter. i've been known to lose my words when i am put on the spot. any eloquence i may posess decides to take a personal day every time it's imperative i put it to use. people intimidate me if i want to impress them. i shake and my face burns, i have trouble breathing and i start saying "uhm," about every third word.
there's some major intimidation factor at work here, see. peter garrett, who we will meet with on our second day in country, already has me quaking in my rugged offroad trainers. How am I supposed to be hip, rock and roll, beautiful, confident, eloquent and brilliant all at the same time? most days i have the energy for about one of those things. Lunch with dr. peter read of australian national university? i have to do all those things and eat while i'm doing it!
beyond that, walking up to a stranger and introducing myself is something i've never done in the united states, let alone in a country where responses to my presence may include assumptions about fat, rich americans and their exaggerated sense of entitlement and presumption. color me excited (i am actually, just terrified at the same time).
and what's most important, really, is the idea that this is where i put my feet in the water and figure out if i've really got what it takes to dedicate myself to this work. the rest of my life is a very long time and academia is oh-so-fickle. perhaps i can't make the cut; maybe my insecurities will force me back to the shelter of a university where i will teach and publish and teach and publish and cry for boredom on my lunch hour every day.
then again, this entire entry is about me - and that atlas complex, well, it's got sharp fingernails and they've dug themselves deep into my palms. because if i really care to do something about anything, if i really want to make a difference to someone (anyone), if i really want to embrace this bleeding heart i've got fueling those warm-fuzzy feelings toward humanity as a whole, then i'll suck it the fuck up and do what has to be done. because it doesn't have anything to do with me. it has to do with other people - entire populations of them - who have no choice, no representation, no rights and no options.
that's why i think i'll succeed.
well. that, a bottle of red wine, a conversation with lisa, and my deeply rooted belief that i am better than everyone at everything and can do pretty much anything should i deign to give it a bit of effort.
my flight leaves at 6pm on monday. i'll be there with boots on.
Labels: Australia, When I grow up
posted by lindsay at 01:59 :: 3 comments