#6 - a poem

Almost there
Just don't care
Something something underwear

There. That was my final dry heave of creativity for the summer before I head back to civilization for rejuvenation. I'm hoping that a real bed, real food and time with the nephew will cure what ails me before I get back to NYC for the apartment hunt, the new job and the new semester.

I'll see you all on the other side.

#5 - dear mr. program-evaluator-guy,

You, sir, are an ass-wipe.

You came to visit our delicate ecosystem to learn of the intricate balances in its fight for survival and during your tour of the facility you politely sat through our lectures and became privy to the most intimate details of our program and its staff. You exhibited all of the qualities of an exceptional evaluator and guest—you were respectful and courteous, deferential and thoughtful—but now it appears that none of your behavior was sincere. It seems that you have smiled and cajoled us into confiding in you only to trample our work and piss in our office plants once our backs were turned. While you, sir, get to return home to the city, or wherever it is you keep your freakishly tall pants, we—we, sir—must remain here to endure the havoc that you have wrought under the guise of assistance and goodwill. You have betrayed our confidence and you have made unbearable what before was barely tolerable. You have, in short, ruined our lives.

In conclusion: Cock, cock, grandma, jism, cock.

Also: Your mom.

Sincerely,

m

#4 - kickapoo canoe cock-up

I am steadily losing the will to live. We are entering Week 7 of 8 of the program and a glint of insanity is starting to appear in everyone’s eyes. We have run out of things to say to each other, the drama of living in close quarters is mounting, and our resilience is flagging. Weekends offer little respite—one night of heavy drinking can only cure so much of the week’s ills and the field trips the next day are a fucking chore. Half the day is inevitably spent on a rickety yellow bus (no matter how close they claim the destination to be) and each week the trips get progressively worse. Last weekend we ate crappy food and saw a crappy cave way the fuck out in Minnesota which, we discovered, has even less to offer the world than Wisconsin. This weekend we went canoeing and the results were very nearly tragic—as in lawsuits-and-funerals.

Fourteen canoes departed and twelve landed at the designated area. One of the missing canoes continued down the river, having missed the unmarked landing site. The other, containing the program director no less, sank to the bottom of the Kickapoo river, no doubt in an attempt to escape the mind-numbing incompetence of its passengers. I hope it is in a better place now.

During the wait, some people milled about the river’s edge, some were driven to the restaurant where the group was supposed to have eaten hours before, and some jumped (despite protest) from the top of a bridge into the murky, branch-mined water.

But wait, things get better—I mean worse. Upon discovering that four people were missing (two ahead and two beyond the landing site), search parties were deployed. One search party consisted of the wife of the man who rented canoes to us out of his shack, and the other consisted of two men—one Navy, one drunk. The wife of canoe guy set off down the river to look for the overly-ambitious group, and the two guys jump into a canoe at the launch site to comb the river for the director’s canoe. In the dark. Without flashlights. Or working cell phones.

Oddly enough, this seemed to concern very few people. Most carried on quite normally through the late dinner while waiting for the others to be found, but my end of the table was fairly subdued. I’ve noticed that in times of trouble this is usually the case. It’s not like in the movies where everyone is running around, frantically screaming. Rather, the worried get very quiet.

I was certainly worried. This seemed just like the kind of thing you see on CNN over the weekend. In the summer it’s always one water tragedy after another—shark attacks and boating accidents, pool drowning and flooding. Fortunately, all returned alive and unharmed, but I still felt like strangling someone. I can’t help thinking that we’ve burned all of our luck on this one trip and something terrible will surely happen on the next. Right now I’m determined not to go. Yet, somehow I know that my mind will be swayed by mid-week. I just can’t drag myself away from every gory detail of this train wreck of a summer.

So stay tuned for further adventures. Next weekend we’re off to Minneapolis and whatever fresh hell it contains. I can’t fucking wait.

#3 - mystery food

We are being housed in a dorm on a small college campus. The men are on the first floor, the women on the second, and each person has their own room. Each room has two beds, two desks, a small refrigerator and an air-conditioning unit. The bathrooms are shared (one per sex) and there are laundry and kitchen facilities in the basement. The walls are cinderblock, the floors are vinyl, and the bathroom tile color pallet is cutting-edge 1973. At some point the facilities director got a bulk deal on two dozen rolls of forest-green floral wallpaper border and plastered it onto the walls of all the common rooms. The woman for whom the dorm is named gazes benevolently over the cramped lobby from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. No one keeps their door open to socialize and when someone cooks in the basement the bathrooms smell like chicken and macaroni.

The campus is grassy and spotted with trees and every day when I walk to breakfast I encounter half a dozen bunnies grazing in the morning shadows. They share the lawns with the sparrows, finches, robins and squirrels. The squirrels startle to their branches and the birds flit around singing and feeding their chirping nests. It’s so fucking picturesque I expect Snow White to burst out of the foliage at any moment, singing some soulful melody about the beauty of forest creatures or her hollow life as a single woman.

We are fed three meals per day during the week and left to fend for ourselves on weekends. Each meal is served in the Math Learning Center a short walk away from the dorm. Lunch and dinner include a salad of plain lettuce (though recently carrot slivers have made an appearance!), a fruit salad of melon and grapes, a mayonnaise-based pasta cold dish, and an assortment of hot food. It is a showcase of mediocrity. The fish and vegetables are always overcooked with the exception of the eggplant which has not yet been served in a manner conducive to consumption. The recipes are strange and bewildering. Dinner conversation centers around 1) identifying the meat, 2) identifying the combination of flavors, and 3) guessing the recipe’s country of origin (or what we believe the cook to believe to be the country of origin). Usually, meals include some sort of discernible theme such as “Mediterranean”, “BBQ”, or “Breakfast”. Lately, however, the cook staff seems to have strayed from this pattern. Last week we were served what were purported to be bean & rice burritos but what turned out to be wraps filled with a teriyaki sauce-drenched mixture of rice, beans, corn, cheese and tofu. One classmate’s burrito included couscous and carrot slices. These so-called ‘burritos’ were accompanied by sides of steamed cabbage, corned beef and boiled potatoes. This led us to wonder if 1) the cook was fucking with us, and 2) if there was any Latino presence in Wisconsin—certainly there wasn’t any working in the kitchen that day. If there was, the poor souls have surely lost all self-respect in addition to their sense of right and wrong.

Our mealtimes are 8 AM, 12 PM and 6 PM. I have never in my life eaten three meals per day unless the third fell somewhere beyond 10 PM. I feel as if I am constantly eating. Mostly I stick with salad and fruit because it is reliably free of sauce and salt. On weekends I grab one meal in town with classmates and eat the rest out of my mini-fridge—cheese, fruit, hummus, diet Dr. Pepper and crackers. There are few restaurants accessible from campus—lack-luster family dining and pizza joints. There is one Chinese restaurant downtown but after our encounter with ‘Mexican’ food in the cafeteria, we have thus far avoided it. Also, for the land of cows and cheese, Wisconsin’s cheeseburgers are severely disappointing.

On Saturday we ate in one restaurant, in the midst of a gaggle of middle-aged bikers. A caravan of Harley Davidsons lined the street out front and their riders filled the tables inside, drinking diet sodas and adjusting their leather vests. I watched one woman twirl a curl of her graying hair from beneath a skull-and-crossbones bandana and wondered what drives people to spend their retirement on fringe-festooned clothing and obnoxiously loud motor vehicles. I understand the appeal of open road and fresh towns, but this does not sufficiently explain the phenomenon. No, it is something else entirely that drives people to tour the country dressed like morose rodeo clowns. I resent their sense of entitlement—that they now spend their lives riding from pristine countryside to charming town, annoying everyone they encounter with their raucous engines. And I resent the fact that by the time I can afford to retire gas will be too expensive for me to do the same and electric motorcycles will make no more noise than a bicycle. Perhaps by that time one will be able to download a variety of loud engine noises from iTunes in order to compensate for the convenience of clean and quiet vehicles. I certainly hope so. This is America after all.

Update: The melon is starting to invade the other food platters—at a recent lunch the vegetarian mélange included mushrooms, apples, honeydew melon and cantaloupe. Bewildered and fearful that the fruit would continue to run amok and mount a hostile takeover of our entire culinary world, one classmate fired off an emailed complaint to the program director. The next day the melon had vanished, replaced by a bowl of tiny, spotted green apples. The people rejoiced.

#2 - dreaming of sleep

I can’t sleep. Well, I suppose that isn’t entirely true since I am still alive and functioning. More accurately, I can’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. Each night I wake up more than half a dozen times and each time I wake up I spend 15-30-60-90+ minutes trying to get back to sleep again. What is keeping me from sleep? It isn’t the erratic rumbling of the mini-fridge, nor the hammering choke of the air-conditioning unit, nor the quality of my mattress—it’s my brain. My brain refuses to shut up. No matter how exhausted I am, it whirrs tirelessly within my head, thinking of storylines, memories, Spider Solitaire, and financial aid papers. These separate entities compete fiercely for my weary attention, jostling back and forth, in and out of the spotlight. They are loud and refuse to be ignored. In addition, my brain insists on translating every thought that flies through my mind, creating an echo chamber of English babble and its bad Persian translation. I have been here for 15 days and have yet to sleep a night.

I expect my brain to explode at any minute or my body to collapse. I am both scared of and fascinated by my condition. I wonder how long this can go on. I wonder if my hair will catch fire. I wonder if I will spontaneously slip into a coma. I wonder if I have discovered some latent superpower within me which allows me to live without rest. I have often wondered what the best superpower would be but now I know that this would be the worst.

I have tried napping, not napping, eating, not eating, caffeine, no caffeine, exercise, showering before bed, reading, writing, studying, and listening to music, but nothing works. My mother suggested beer and my brother Benadryl but I don’t think either is a viable long-term solution for the 6 weeks that remain in the program. I don’t often dream, or rather I remember fewer of them than usual. The other night I had the first silly dream of my life. I held in my hand the red foam apricot-sized ball that had allowed me to fly over the dark city and when it had expanded to the size of a large melon I placed it on my head like a hat. When the villains spotted me hiding in their lair I snatched the foam hat from my head and it promptly shrank back down to its original size. As I frantically whistled the tune necessary to cause it to fly (“Reveille”) I paused briefly to appreciate how ridiculous everything had become. When I awoke I hummed the tune on the way to the bathroom and it filled my head until I finally escaped back into a fitful sleep.

The next morning I giggled to myself uncontrollably over breakfast, goofy with exhaustion. One classmate inquired about my state of mind but I brushed him off. How does one say “whistle” and “foam ball hat” in Persian? I only know how to deny my insanity. A few nights ago I returned to my usual pattern of nightmares and awoke feeling hopeful that things might once again return to normal and I would finally get some sleep. I have learned my lesson—I will appreciate what I once had, even more if I can get it back again. What I wouldn’t give for a full night’s worth of zombie hordes or battlefield atrocity. Here’s to dreaming.

Update: In a desperate attempt to sleep, I resolved to exhaust myself completely, shower and then chug a beer. I did a couple hundred crunches/push-ups/lunges, showered, downed the beer and went to bed. The beer made me sleepy but no dice. I didn’t drop off until a long while after—I stopped looking at the clock after I passed the 90-minute mark—and sleep was fitful. The following morning I awoke sore and tired and that night resigned myself to drugs. A full dose of NyQuil did the trick. As did Benadryl the following night. I don’t like the whole drugging business, but for now I need sleep and it will have to do. I’m relieved that 1) something finally worked, and 2) that it wasn’t the goddamned crunches.

#1 - greetings from Ironsin!

I have not posted anything new in 6 months due to a combination of grad school rigors and sheer laziness and although it is now officially summer, for me it is no time to indulge wholeheartedly in the latter. My course of study (for whom I have only myself to blame) requires me to spend these months studying Persian so that I might acquire sufficient language skills to qualify for placement in advanced language classes this fall. I know , it all sounds very glamorous, but unlike my classmates who are off to all corners of the globe this summer to absorb native cultures and save the Third World from disease and economic hardship, I will be staying here in the States. Due to circumstances beyond my control—such as the chance that Bush may take this remaining time to go for three in the Middle East—I will not be studying in Iran this summer, nor anywhere near it. Instead, I have sequestered myself in an 8-week language immersion program in rural Wisconsin—or, as I like to call it in the spirit of exotic flair—Ironsin.

We are a small group in a small town near the Mississippi River. The town is quaint and strange. You can walk down the middle of the road until nearly downtown without encountering any vehicles to endanger your stroll. There is a Taco Bell and a Hooters but no Starbucks. It is quiet. It is muggy. It is only Week 2 and it is driving us all insane.

But of course that is the idea—that there be nothing left for us to do except eat, sleep and live Persian. I must confess, though this is an immersion program, few of us uphold the Persian language speaking rule 24/7. We do our best, but we have discovered that at a certain point one’s brain reaches a melting point where it simply refuses to function—it will not read, it will not provide words for the mouth, it will not translate. It simply sits back stubbornly with its arms folded across its chest, pouting. And so we give in and occasionally speak English, but it is always quietly and with guilt in our voices.

Only one person in the program adheres strictly to the ‘no English’ rule. He sits everyday in his room or the lounge, hunched over his dictionary and notes, with Iranian satellite TV blaring. He does not speak English and will not tolerate hearing it—if he hears a non-Persian conversation he turns away, back to the seclusion from whence he came. He brought his own advanced reading materials and has volunteered to provide them to others in an extra class session at night. Although I admire his dedication and wish that I had such willpower, I fear it as well. It is a scary thing to watch someone lose himself so completely to anything. It is these very cases of self-immolation that allow me to justify such distractions as Spider Solitaire and blogging. It isn’t healthy to do one thing nonstop for 8 weeks. It wouldn’t be good—no, it wouldn’t be right—to limit myself to the guidelines of the program: no English spoken, written or heard. Adherence to such rules would be a detriment to my relationships, my world-awareness and my mental health. Blogging will be good for me, and besides, the opportunity to disobey the rules in such a blatantly passive-aggressive manner really appeals to my sense of contrariness.

Thus, this summer I have decided to provide the occasional blog update for whoever has grown so tired of their own boredom that they would seek temporary refuge in thoughts of mine. Though none may prove thrilling, hopefully you will find that the grass is indeed greener in Ironsin.

back to crazy

It's been a looong time since my last post, but as of 8:26pm tonight I am free of academia for a whole month. What better way to kick off winter break than with some weird news from a far-off land. Nope, this time it isn't Germany--it's Singapore, the city-state you'd love to hate if only that weren't illegal according to some anal-retentive law they passed back in the 90s. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. Apparently "fraudulent possession of women's underwear" is a crime.