June 23, 2005
Pics from the Districts
I'm back from the Districts. For those of you who don't know what 'the districts' refers to, it's the part of Timor that's not Dili. And I'm back. This basically means that in the past two days I have traversed a large part of this country â€" from seeing the rice fields to cows and goats all over the road everywhere to the most stupendous mountains â€" I am now convinced that this country is a jewel lost in the myriad complexities of international war and strife. I don't have much time to write because I want to go do fun things, but I might record my experiences later. Or at least I hope I will, but for now I'll just post a few of the amazing pictures I took.
Bacau in the Sunrise: 
A Really Old Traditional House in Lospaolos: 
A House (Uma) Built like all the houses around, burnt out sturcture in the foreground: 
Posted by storbert at 4:57 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
The Real Malae Bulak
I'm lost for words. I know it's been a day when I'm lost for words. Actually, it's been more that a day. I wanted an adventure, and I'm getting it. I know I might read these words a few months from now and think that I'm crazy, and I probably am. There's probably nothing wrong with that now too â€" but as of right now I love this country, I love it and I admire it and I know I don't belong here. With the strongest emotion I've had in a long time I'm grateful that the Timorese are letting me live here â€" with my arrogant dress, strange mannerisms, horrible language skills, and outlandish height. A friend once told me that one day I would travel to a country and it would change my life. I don't know the course of my life or where it is taking me, but I have a strong feeling that he was dead right. I'm almost choked up when writing this, I don't know how to explain it. I like stories, not emotions, and I'm not sure how to describe it. So if anyone is reading this I'm stopping now for your benefit so you don't have to suffer through my exhaustive melodrama of conscience.
Today was far from perfect, and some of what I have seen is not something to love. It had at least two firsts: and for me they were most notable because they are so strikingly opposite. Today, a small girl said to me passing on the street, "Hello Misus!" for the first time â€" and then later on the beach a group of young men who I was photographing were yelling, "Photo, Mister!" I'm guessing this haircut of mine isn't doing me any favors in identifying my gender.
I have been hiking through the mountains with a bunch of Aussies that call themselves Hash House Harriers or something like that [I've never been good with names]. They apparently are drinkers with a running problem. I've been to a pool in an island oasis of calm in this sometimes chaotic world I now live in, with three Timorese children who could steal even my ice-hard heart. I've been running in the early morning sun when the land is still cool and the light shines with glory (and no fear of sunburn).
But in these worlds of fun and pleasure, there are always reminders of the two-tired economy we live in. The 'Hashers' are boat-loads of fun, but at the restaurant where the bunch retired to after singing songs children would walk around selling CDs and bracelets. The owner (a nice man as far as I could tell) threw one out by his ear. I guess I understand â€" he is after all running a business, and restaurants are hard to keep profitable â€" but I still felt a twang. He was just a kid, skinny, walking among the beer-bellied and jovial (tipsy?) lot of us trying to make a buck or two. I wasn't sure who should have been thrown out by their ears. In our little pool-ed oasis, kids stood on the barbed wire fence surrounding the place and stared at the malae women parading around with their ample flesh in bikinis, munching on fried shrimp and cocktails. True, at heart it was leering, and rather crude â€" but it was also a wall with barbed wire that non-malae kids 8 and younger, despite an obvious affinity for pools, would never be allowed to cross. And worst of all â€" I went running in the early morning sun. I went running because I want to stay in shape, because I want a skinny little butt like everyone around me (because I'm jetlagged and there's nothing better to do in the morning . . .) â€" whatever the reason I'm well aware that running is the greatest luxury of all. I'm not running anywhere, I'm not running for any real reason â€" I'm running because I'm a yuppie and because I have so much food I have to run some of it off or else become a little butterball. A kid in the road who I passed while running started laughing, and then mock-ran with me for a couple of meters before saying something to everyone and laughing hard. I laughed too â€" because I knew he was dead right. Crazy foreigner indeed. I am welcomed to Timor, and I'm dammed lucky for it.
Posted by storbert at 3:45 AM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2005
Guilty as Sin
I've been here only a day and a bit and already the guilt is starting to kick in full-force. In Bali I knew there was poverty â€" behind the glitzy hotels, just down the block you'd find the vendors selling jacked-priced goods in front of paint-shedding buildings of pink and grey. Walk two minutes from the Ritz Carlton and you will find trash heals on the corner with ridiculously skinny chickens pecking out an existence from the refuse. Squatted in the opposite corner is a group of three children playing with some kind of round rocks, who pause to stare at the big white girl as I walk by.
Yet, even in this I remained aloof. When a vendor tried to fleece me for a sari on a street corner, and then grabbed my arm when I walked out to stop me from leaving his store â€" my rage flared and I turned to stare at him, silently, thinking â€" 'How dare you!?' For the rest of my walk I looked with anger at those aggressive hawkers who called me 'Miss' and followed me down the street with some good to sell. I thought: "What? Do they think I'm made out of gold?"
Dili is different. The poverty is not different, I think, it's just more apparent. In Bali I could choose to ignore it. But here, from the clothes and jewelry I wear, to my prancing around in my pressed white pants, I must look like I'm flaunting wealth. No, I am not rich â€" but neither am I poor â€" and what I once took for granted I now realize is the equivalent of materialistic Eden.
Back in Bali there were two sketchy men who really pissed me off. The first just suggestively leered, "Hey pretty lady, wanna do something?" Horrified I walked faster. The second one asked 'Hey beautiful. Eat me." For a second I was confused, wondering if Balinese culture had forms of cannibalism that I wasn't aware of, but then just assuming it was another crude sexual advance. It was only today I started thinking that he meant it in the same way Americans mean it: he hated me. I realized I can't blame him one bit.
Posted by storbert at 9:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2005
Welcome to Dili
It's what everyone has said to me the minute I stepped off the plane. I've had a few who say it with real, genuine smiles suggesting that I really am welcome to Dili â€" and a few with wry smiles as if they have a secret about this place I'm going to be clued in on in a few months and then I'd wish I wasn't so welcome to Dili. I wonder how I'm going to say it in a few months time.
It's not even 12 hours since I stepped on the plane from Bali â€" and I feel like I've lived a weeks worth in that time. I can say this: everyone I've met here is damn awesome, and that's saying something coming from me. But more to the point, the past hours have been jam-packed with sensory over-load. I've been, "Up to Jesus," or to the world's second largest Christ statue (I believe it's called Rae Christo), and it is one of the most awe-inspiring views I have seen in a long while. It was a lovely end to a crazy day. I've met tons of people who all seem, well, awe-inspiring too, but for the life of me I can remember only a few names, mainly my bosses, and am going to have to be the village idiot for the next couple weeks asking people to tell me who they are again because my memory is apparently seriously lacking. I've eaten grilled chicken on a beach with the soft wind blowing over the darkened horizon of a lovely seascape, with scrawny cats meowing at my feet and fur-patched dogs with huge eyes wandering around staring at my feast.
Speaking of dogs, I have also seen one of the strangest sights â€" and if you should fall into the category of polite company I would stop reading here. Sitting on the back porch of the office, drinking a nice cup of tea â€" I noticed that two dogs, were, shall we say, 'stuck' together, and by 'stuck' I will self-censor and avoid the graphic description of just what parts were stuck together and leave that to your imagination. Trying to have a normal conversation with those two hopping around in the background was comical to say the least.
I am now typing in my room on borrowed time. I plugged in my power surge protector only to find it's the one device I own not compatible to 220V, and that dear device, which I have carried with me for over four years of brutal college life, is now fried like an egg on the Dili pavement. So I'm writing in a hotel room, a borrowed room, on borrowed battery time, graced with the presence of my friend, nicknamed "Freaky Gecko," or Mr. FG who, after running all over my walls on my entrance, has hidden in a corner and (if amphibinaly possible) is more scared about my presence in the room than I am.
Welcome to Dili indeed. My borrowed time is up, and I'm going to jet-lagged sleep â€" and perhaps tomorrow will bring more strange stories but until then â€" goodnight.
Posted by storbert at 5:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2005
I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane
Yeah, last entry from the states. Guess I'm more freaked that I'm going to forget to pack something than anything else. At the same time I'm trying to avoid the whole "what's the worst that could happen" though path - because right now my mind has come up with some seriously messed up possibilities.
In other news, I finally have my digital camera and can upload some serious and artsy photos. I mean seriously, worhsip my photo skills.
Posted by storbert at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2005
More On Speeches
Via my Mom (who is awesome):
The Chronicle of Higher Education has been reading my mind. They write:
It's a time-honored tradition for celebrities who are in demand as commencement speakers to use ghost writers. And when all else fails, the speakers have been known to simply deliver the same speech they gave the previous year. So it was that Tim Russert, the NBC newsman and best-selling author, found himself addressing Harvard students on Wednesday, at the university's annual Class Day event. It wasn't a commencement address, but it was one of four graduation-related speeches he has delivered this spring. Turns out, the speeches had more than a little in common. As first reported last month in the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Mass., Mr. Russert has apparently delivered the same basic commencement speech for several years. (According to The Chronicle's commencement-speaker database, he has spoken on 17 campuses since 2000.) At Harvard on Wednesday, the students were ready. Equipped with cards listing pat phrases from past speeches, set out in a bingo-like format, they ticked off the passages as Mr. Russert spoke and then, having completed a row, shouted out "Bingo!" More details of the scheme are reported in an article in The Harvard Crimson, the student-run newspaper.
In case you were wondering who is speaking, you can also search the Chronicle for graduation speakers (requires subscription). A quick search on Google for Commencement Speakers brings up a whole load of other problems associated with the speakers these days. First of all, schools compete to get famous speakers, but that does not mean that a speaker will be any good, or even appropriate. Speakers can run into problems with religious questions, as Crossswalk.com reports on Senator Hilary's controversial honorary degrees from Catholic Universities. Ben Shapiro of Townhall.com thinks that all speakers are too liberal. Read: my problem with political agendas in a graduation speech - but for the record I don't think it can ruin a speech because Jon Stewart gave a horrendously partisan speech that I liked, because it was funny and honest.
But anyways - it looks like other people have had these thoughts before me. How disappointing. Humanity.org has a list of great commencement speeches in their article on 'the art of the commencement speech'. This should be required reading for all speakers.
Posted by storbert at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 11, 2005
The Good, Bad, and Ugly Graduation Speeches
Having just returned form my brother's graduation, I am once again in the mood to spout on what makes a good speech. I know perhaps I get redundant, but in this case I am just plain tired of people blabbing who have no point and like the sound of their voices (man is this a glass house I live in), and I wish to jot a few notes, if only to myself, on some of the basic do-not's of graduation speeches.
First of all, I'd like to point to a few people who have mastered the art of commencemental inspiration. The crown goes to Garrison Keillor, a man whose compilation of poetry is the only one I care to read, and re-read, and dream of one day memorizing the damn thing so I can stop carrying it around. Let me give you an excerpt from his speech:
We need to talk about the pursuit of failure, I think. A person who does not know failure is a person with a poor sense of reality. A person who goes through his 20s and 30s racking up one prize after another, getting the great job and the beautiful size 4 wife and the starter mansion and the two beautiful, gifted children with the Celtic names, is a man who is headed for a gigantic mid-life crisis in which he runs away with a waitress named Misty and perms his hair and becomes a 45-year-old singer/songwriter. You don't want to do that. A mid-life crisis in which you feel that, in spite of appearances, your life is meaningless and you're a big fat failure and nobody really likes you. If you could, I think you should try having your mid-life crisis right now, when you're smarter and when you're stronger -- and not have it 20 years from now, when it's going to be a big embarrassment to everybody. It's amazing how much you can learn if you're lucky enough to get into trouble when you're young. I recommend it to you.
This is from his 2001 Baccalaureate Address to Princeton, and the only reason I know about it is because my sister sat through it and was forever more infatuated â€" perhaps even changed. But let me dissect (like a frog and kill the humor) why it makes a good speech. One: though he is in a chapel and begins discussing his Fundamentalist-Christian-Whiskey-tinged roots, Keillor manages not to preach. It's a harder thing than one would realize: the avoidance of peachiness. On a podium it is hard for the non-ordained speaker to remember he's not certified to speak on God's truth and the meaning of life and all that pop music. The most recent bad speech I heard was centered on the subject of gratitude with enough sappy alliteration that I feared I was in the wrong event and this was a sad poetry reading (see Charles Burkowski on that), and by the end I was only grateful for the long awaited shutting of her mouth. Yes, one should be grateful, and I'm glad she extols this virtue, but timing is essential and graduation is a rare event where speeches can either stick in the heads of the listeners or do nothing but waste people's time. I only remembered her address because I was busy cataloging all her holier-than-thou prim and pomp mistakes.
Ok enough â€" I'm moving on. Two: yes, you have an audience. More specifically, a speaker has a soapbox and an hostage audience. Hell, the kids can't graduate until you are done talking. But more importantly, your audience is listening for you to talk to them â€" not about some random subject you found interesting last Thursday after hardball. I'm hoping most speakers talk because they have some work of advice: in this case Keillor failed a lot and seemed to be damn proud of it. Like most advice, graduates might think about it, spit it out, go get drunk, and then start the long haul of soul-crushing workdays and health insurance forms until their faces and fingers wrinkle with apathy. Graduation really is, in my mind, a special day â€" because despite the many employment contracts already signed pre-diploma, there are a whole bunch of kids who are about to burst into the world who have hope and passion (hopefully), and who might actually change a thing or two if given the proper impetus. Yet, most speakers think that they are there to speak because they are cool, thus the audience must want to hear about their own lives, their personal interests, and especially their political views. Wrong â€" no one really cares. Speeches that are on-topic, pertinent and focused win my praise.
Three: shortness. I am to blame as well, as I am obviously not short. So I will try now for once. Be short. Society watches TV and has a short attention span so indulge us. Besides, the kids are graduating from sitting and being bored out of their skulls. Give them their first post-grad gift and don't blab.
So those are my few, well-meaning and rarely followed suggestions for anyone planning to speak, and not just about graduation, but to anyone who is stuck and can't leave. People will love you for it and I won't have to write any more ranting blog entries, and wouldn't that just make the world a better place?
Posted by storbert at 1:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 8, 2005
PiA Blogs Operational
I guess the blogs are up and running now - with the slight problem that I forgot to tell people that they don't have access to their own configuration files. I might have to send out a mass email to inform people of that one if it's not finalized within the next couple of days. Until then, everyone's blog is available to the right and hopefully will be updated by their owners sometime in the next coming weeks. I'm really looking forward to seeing what people do with them!
Posted by storbert at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2005
East Timor Travel Articles
A couple people [PiAers Amy Kohout and Anastasia] have sent me some wonderful links.
The first I actually read in the New York Times and is worth checking out. It is a half-hearted endorsement of East Timor as an unspoiled-though-hard-to-get-to travel area, and catalogs both some of the nice parts (scuba diving, which I don't know how to do) and some of the not as nice parts.
The second article documents the work of an expat doctor in ET - and I'll let it speak for itself.
[Incidentally, if you don't want to have to log on to the NYTimes website go to bugmenot.comm - and they give you a free username and password]
Posted by storbert at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2005
Catching Up on Laguardia
I've finally been catching up on my absolute lack of news over the last few decades and a story caught my eye: apparently there is this whole hubbub over Laguardia, and I don't mean the airport. The controversy was started when, on May 17th, the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) of the Philippines Chairperson, Consoliza Laguardia, announced that all,
. . . public affairs programs, news documentaries, sociopolitical editorials and all other programs of the same category submit themselves to screening. [From ABS-CBN News Editorial]
What is fascinating is that this announcement has caused such heat as to engender calls for Laguardia's resignation â€" both from the Senate Minority Leader, Aquilino Pimentel Jr, as well as Monsignor Nico Bautista, an influential Catholic priest. The fall out is interesting, and many journalists are responding vehemently to the request for censorship. Where it will all lead, no one really knows.
Posted by storbert at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
Still Not Done
So I thought I was done yesterday ranting about the problems of an isolationist society, but no, I'm still thinking about it. Today my thought have been about the old Southern family - the one I don't understand and never really will. I'm a Yankee by raising, Dixie by blood and cosmopolitan by arrogance - so I should have no real problem living with the fact that I call no place a true home. Yet . . .
I keep remembering this family reunion down in Bama, in the state which we left while I was still young enough not to notice the difference between the language and the cultural significance of 'Sir' and 'Ma'am'. The Yanks stood on the sidelines of warmth and potato salad. I just thought for the longest time that I just was excluded because I didn't belong.
In the South it's just plain different. Going to that reunion was an eye-opener -- all I could do was stare (not quite slack-jawed) at the familiarity of the people around me â€" with everyone except me and my family. It was also the first time I understood small-town mentality. The joys of the rural South had nothing to do with what you could do or become, or who you 'are.' Such things are happily unquestioned. You are who you have always been, in a place where you may or may not inspire local gossip, local lust, local admiration or derision. Whatever the case may be let no man go lonely. This was one true offering of Alabama. I bet there are others, but I haven't really been there long enough to know. Suffice it to say that it gets me thinking that my observations on the 'American' lifestyle are not really universal, but merely extensions of the places I am most familiar with - and cities and suburbs are inherently isolation. What it is like elsewhere, hopefully someday I'll find out.
Posted by storbert at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2005
Americans Like Cars and Houses
Perhaps because I am leaving the country I am spending more time these days looking at how Americans live their lives, or more specifically, how I have lived mine in the 23 years up until today. Now, I may be an over-reflective person but I figure it might not be that bad of an idea to get some of these things down before I leave for distant lands. So here goes: a couple random thoughts about the American existence, mainly centered on the idea of cars and houses.
Sometime while helping an architecture student with his thesis on pre-fab housing (whatever that is), he told me the reason that modern America is so isolated into nuclear families in their cookie-cutter white picket fenced houses is the direct result of a post-WWII government program that encouraged WWII vets to move with their newly wooed and not-yet-domesticated wives to move to the suburbs and into houses with little beauty but lots of space. In history class, we learned that much of property law was formed around the concept of lineage, and parents trying to convince their kids to stay at home and help them with work. The single family home changed all that.
Thus began the foundations of the silent, sterile home -- where parents rarely speak to their extended families unless to go on awkward and very silted family vacations where the kids sit around and wonder who these freaks are (and quietly as how they could be blood relations . . .). Where did I come from with my love of the silence and isolation of a car. I dislike subways. Not because they are packed, but because it is the unwritten, iron-clad law that you never, ever, talk on a subway. Only at night when the drinking crowds descend upon the mass transportation system is talking allowed. On the commute to and from work, however – silence is preserved. Those few people who do talk are either entertainment or an annoyance to the rest of the train. No – even in crowded train where you are pressed up against an over-sized bosom on one side and the coffee-breathing mid-life crisis businessman on the other – you might as well be riding in a car. At least then you could play good music over the radio.
Then it occurs to me -- I am not distraught about the love of cars and houses. I value my privacy just like everyone else. My problem is that I see what was lost in the vaults of silence left by lack of human contact. Surrounded by walls and metal car doors we are both protected, and forbidden, from real human contact. [For more on this point everyone who has not seem the movie Crash must stop reading now and go and see it. I'm not kidding.] I don't know who I am to say it's worse - I can only say that I do see something lacking, and I don't know how to get it back.
Posted by storbert at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2005
A Few Useless Thoughts
I just graduated. Recently graduated people do many things. They go to work. They go home. They discover there is this absolutely massive world out there that isn't as nice as they might want it to be. Whatever they do it's all new. I, in my new adventures, have been stuck waxing the hull of my dad's boat for about seven hours a day and unfortunately that gives me massive amounts of time to think. Thinking out of school can be very, very bad and can cause serious brain damage so I'm going to write down some of these random thoughts so I can stop.
Our graduation speakers were HORRID. By horrid I mean really bad. Chevy Chase might as well have given a lecture on how really stupid people can become famous in Hollywood . . . and something about vibrating razors that I didn't quite catch. So I wonder what I would have said if I had been there on that podium. Probably nothing, or a first-class demonstration on stuttering. But had I spoken I think I'd have said something like this:
-------------------------
Dear Graduating Class of 2005,
You are all like squirrels. Yes, at college you made fun of squirrels because they sort through human refuse for nourishment and tend to either get fat or die. They make silly noises at people who get too close, are unafraid of even dangerous drunken brutes and think they own this place. Moreover, squirrels tend to be isolated creatures unless it is mid-spring and they make this loud, cackling mating ritual dance that involves tree-shaking and shrieking in well view of the entire public. Now remind me â€" why exactly do Princeton students make fun of squirrels? The only difference I see is that we don't literally sort through trash â€" only the garbage of high-flatulent 'intellectualism' â€" which I believe smells worse.
See, like squirrels, we don't talk much. We get talked to. Graduation is three more days of being talked to in case we forget right before we leave that no one cares what we think and college students should be seen and not heard. When we used to talk, it was only to spit back what was said in reading or in lectures and any deviance from this formula is risking the ever-feared and damming "B". We pay many, many smackeroons to be shown, daily, how rear-kissing can be extremely useful, that the man who wrote, "On BS," had a really good grip on reality but he had to retire before saying it, and no one, ever will read your senior thesis. Probably not even your advisor.
So what should we know before we head into the real world? What can we finally fill in to the vast spaces in our so-called education that will make us float in the workpace or grad school, which does not value parrot-squawkers? I don't know. I've been doing it for four years too â€" but I do know what many of us have lost along the way and we must, nay, need to recover before trying to do anything. Many of us forgot what we started out trying to do. We all, I believe, had a good reason to be educated. Whether to find a profession that is really producing something for money, or trying to save the world (idiots . . .), we all thought we could do something in this world that is worth fighting for â€" worth putting up with four years of bad coffee.
We need it back before we do anything. Hope is a dangerous thing to lose. So often with studying the real world we can become cynical about its deficiencies, our own inability to do anything to fix it, and the vast, insurmountable, inertia that fills the minds of people who only talk about a problem but even begin the fight to solve it.
This is our chance - no more rhetoric, no more hypothesizing. We go places where life moves too fast to cry about your less-than-3.8 GPA - in the words of the ever-esteem-able Yoda: Do or do not, there is no try. Here we can finally see, and perhaps become, God willing, heroes. In short, we are leaving the squirrels. They will still be there in case we want to come and visit. But for right now we have places to go and its best not to look back.
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Ok, I know that was bad. But I have been waxing a boat for eight hours a day for the last two days so cut me some slack.
Posted by storbert at 9:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2005
First Entry
Introductions are usually awkward. And with that insanely generalized statement I'm opening this blog that I hope will document one long extended introduction. In case you don't know me, you are lucky and you will probably not meet me. If you do know me you probably already know half my quirks so I need no real introduction.
So what should I say with my first post on this most lovely site I plan to soon call my own? I perhaps could set out a personal manifesto â€" but that would be stupid because it will probably change within minutes of my arrival into a new country or else lead me dangerously to try and adhere to it snowballing into an ideological frenzy culminating in a power-hungry dictatorship. Right now I don't like power hungry dictatorships so I'm not going to write a manifesto.
This is getting long already. Not a good start. Ok â€" what do I plan to write about? My silly, insignificant and mundane life which I plan to lead for a little while in East Timor. If I come out crazy â€" this will document my descent into madness. If I come out altered for the better, this will (hopefully) document my revelations. Whatever. This might just be something for Mom (I love you!) to read so she knows I'm still alive even if I stink at answering emails.
In any case â€" if you are still reading this, you probably need to get a life more than I do. So let's both do it . . . right about . . . now . . .
Posted by storbert at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)