frail gestures

A's house probably was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.

I wonder why he seems to calm.

That's all I have to say ... processing.

Went to New York today to visit Mike. I took the train to Hoboken, the Path to the World Trade Center and the subway to Brooklyn. It was the first time I was in the rebuilt subway station at the WTC. There was a metal fence through which you could view the contstruction. I half felt like taking a picture -- it's history -- but that seemed too morbid, too callous.

Walt Whitman mused about the streets, the droves of faces in the city. I wonder what he would think of this New York, this city I am half in love with but that always makes me want to wash my hands. Its grimy subways and mingling scents; floating faces and melodious language; the Brooklyn Bridge and the glitter of Rockefeller Center. But I wonder, if I live there, will it make me hard? How can one live among 9 million others and not become desentized to them?

Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;

Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;

Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;

Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!

Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!

Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day! ... Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the beating drums, as now; The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded;) Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus—with varied chorus, and light of the sparkling eyes; Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me. -- Walt Whitman

We got back from Rehoboth yesterday -- and the week was amazingly relaxing. The drive back was not, and frankly being home makes me feel claustrophobic. I feel like a potted plant with no room to grow.

(At left is one of my favorite pictures from our vacation. It's actually nearby Dewey Beach.)

I fly back to DC is Wednesday morning.

Most of the time, I miss my family like crazy. There's something about people who love you and whom you love unconditionally that can't be replaced. And, for the most part, I had this amazing childhood -- digging in the backyard, having to get out of the pool because my lips turned blue, riding my bike in circles with the neighborhood kid, devouring book after book like it's good New York-style pizza ... But I come back here, to my parents' idyllic little town just outside New York City, and *poof* I'm 12 years old again. It seems the saying is true: You can never go home again. Somehow I grew out of this when I wasn't paying attention.

Meanwhile, though, I need a change. Something has to give and I just don't know what. There's a quote that goes something like "Change is inevitable, except in vending machines." (I'm sure I mangled that, but you get the point.) If I'm not changing, I'm not growing, and if I'm not growing, I'm not living. But damnit, there's only so many hours in the day, and so much I love or have to do. I don't like to give anything up, and I like to put my whole self into what I do.

I've been juggling a couple of books and LSAT studying. The title of this blog comes from an e.e. cummings poem I love. He's incredibly sensual, and he plays with words, just makes them up. He fascinates me. Also, a book on American history that I would have finished eons ago, except it's too heavy to lug around. Working on Reading Lolita in Tehran -- which would probably be a better read if I had read Lolita in the first place. I picked it up after finishing The Bookseller of Kabul, which was a really good, albeit brief, read.

To a lot of Americans -- certainly to me -- the cultural differences between Iran's fundamentalist regime and Afghanistan's emerging post-Taliban government can seem mere nuances. But the two are amazingly different. One, Iran, was among the most liberal of Mideastern nations before the revolution -- and women there enjoyed more freedom than in many neighboring countries. From what I've picked up in these two memoirs, in pre-revolution Iran those women who covered themselves completely in black robes did so largely by choice, to show their devotion perhaps. But when it's mandatory, what does that show? How does that distinguish the individual? Afghanistan, meanwhile, seems to be a place where nothing works -- and where one's surroundings are a mix of things pre-Soviet, Soviet, pre-Taliban, Taliban and recent. Buildings housing the "middle class" and built, irronically by the Communists, have become dilapitated dwellings where water is only on a few hours a day and likely doesn't travel higher than the second floor. People my age have lived in a war zone there entire lives. One person in the Bookseller, the teenage son of the title character, embarks on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Ali. He muses on the information from a decades-old book, detailing the famous pottery and reknowned fruit stands along the road to the site; the side of that same road is now littered with roadside bombs from decades of war.

But what seems similar between these two countries is the separate worlds of men and women. Like ships passing in the night, men and women live in segregated worlds, each with its own rules, power structures and ways to get around the former two.

At first, I was fundamentally against this. It seemed egotistical to think anybody would care to read my musings, complaints, bored ramblings.

Then, I realized it could be empowering.

Nobody has to know its here. Maybe it will be my secret -- and a chance for me to throw thoughts out there, and let them bounce of the edges of the universe, to reverberate among the other countless ideas spewed about the Internet.

So here goes ...